LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE BOGOMILS 



BULGARIA AND BOSNIA; 



%\t felg ^rotestants d % fost. 



AN ATTEMPT TO RESTORE SOME LOST LEAVES OF 
PROTESTANT HISTORY. 



BY 
L. P. T^OnK FTT M .TY. 



ps~ m 




PHILADELPHIA : 

AMEKICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 

1420 CHESTNUT STREET. 

o o u / 









Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by the 

AMEKICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 
In the 0ffic6 of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 







CONTENTS, 



SECTION I. 

PAGE 

Introduction. — The Armenian and other Oriental churches 13 

SECTION II. 

Dualism and the phantastic theory of our Lord's advent 
in the Oriental churches. — The doctrines they rejected. — 
They held to baptism 18 

SECTION III. 

Gradual decline of the dualistic doctrine. — The holy and 
exemplary lives of the Paulicians 22 

SECTION IV. 

The Cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Empress Theo- 
dora. — The free state and city of Tephrice 25 

SECTION V. 

The Sclavonic development of the Catharist or Paulician 
churches. — Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Servia its principal 
seats. — Euchites, Massalians, and Bogomils 27 

SECTION VI. 
The Bulgarian Empire and its Bogomil czars 30 



4 CONTENTS. 

SECTION VII. 

PAGfi 

A Bogomil congregation and its worship. — Mostar, on the 
Narenta 32 



SECTION VIII. 

The Bogomilian doctrines and practices. — The Credentes 
and Perfecti. — Were the Credentes baptized ? 37 

SECTION IX. 

The orthodoxy of the Greek and Roman churches rather 
theological than practical. — Fall of the Bulgarian Em- 
pire 43 

SECTION X. 

The Emperor Alexius Comnenus and the Bogomil Elder 
Basil. — The Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena. 46 



SECTION XL 

The martyrdom of Basil. — The Bogomil churches rein- 
forced by the Armenian Paulicians under the Emperor 
John Zimisces 50 



SECTION XII. 

The purity of life of the Bogomils. — Their doctrines and 
practices. — Their asceticism 54 

SECTION XIII. 

The missionary spirit and labors of the elders and Per- 
fecti. — The entire absence of any hierarchy.. 58 



CONTENTS. 5 

SECTION XIV. 

PAGE 

The Bogomil churches in Bosnia and the Herzegovina. — 
Their doctrines more thoroughly scriptural than those 
of the Bulgarian churches. — Bosnia as a banate and 
kingdom 60 

SECTION XV. 
Bosnian history continued. — The good Ban Culin ».. 63 

SECTION XVI. 

The growth of the Bogomil churches under Culin. — Their 
missionary zeal and success .*... 66 

SECTION XVII. 

The authorities from whose testimony this narrative is 
drawn. — Its thorough corroboration by a cloud of wit- 
nesses 68 

SECTION XVIII. 

The era of persecution. — The crusades against the Bogo- 
mils. — The Archbishop of Colocz 72 

SECTION XIX. 

Further crusades. — The hostility of Pope Innocent IV. — 
More lenient, but not more effective, measures 76 

SECTION XX. 

The establishment of the Inquisition in Bosnia. — Letter 
of Pope John XXII. — Previous testimony of enemies 
to the purity of the lives of the Bogomils 78 

1* 



6 CONTENTS. 

SECTION XXI. 

PAGE 

Further persecution. — A lull in its fury during the over- 
lordship of the Serbian Czar Stephen Dushan. — The 
reign of theTvart-ko dynasty 81 

SECTION XXII. 

The Reformation in Bohemia and Hungary a Bogomil 
movement. — Renewal of persecution under Kings Ste- 
phen Thomas and Stephen Tomasevic. — The Pobra- 
timtsvo 85 

SECTION XXIII. 

Overtures to the sultan. — The surrender of Bosnia to 
Mahomet II. under stipulations. — His base treachery 
and faithlessness. — The cruel destruction and enslave- 
ment of the Bogomils of Bosnia and, twenty years later, 
of those of the Duchy of Herzegovina 89 

SECTION XXIV. 

The Bogomils not utterly extinguished. — Their influ- 
ence on society, literature, and progress in the Middle 
Ages. — Dante, Milton, etc. — The Puritans. — Conclusion. 92 

APPENDIX I. 

A liturgy of the Toulouse Publicans in (probably) the 
Sixteenth Century 103 

APPENDIX II. 

"Were the Paulician and Bogomil churches Baptist 
churches? 107 

NOTES 119 



PEEFACE. 



The belief that there had existed through 
all the ages since the Christian era churches 
which adhered strictly to scriptural doctrines 
and practice — churches which were the true 
successors in faith and ordinances of those 
founded by the apostles, and had never paid 
homage to Greek patriarch or Roman pope — 
was firmly impressed upon the minds of the 
Baptist church-historians of the first fifty 
years of the present century. They believed 
also that these churches were essentially Bap- 
tist in their character, and some of them made 
extensive researches among the works of secu- 
lar and ecclesiastical historians of the early 
centuries to find tangible proofs to sustain 
their conviction. They were partially, but 
only partially, successful, for the historians of 
those periods were ecclesiastics of either the 
Greek or Roman churches, who added, in 
most cases, the bitterness of personal spite, 

1 



8 PREFACE. 

from their discomfiture by the elders of these 
churches, to their horror at any departure 
from papal or patriarchal decrees. 

For the last twenty-five or thirty years the 
ranks of the Baptist ministry have been so 
largely recruited from Psedobaptist churches 
— all of which had their origin, confessedly, 
either at the Reformation or since — that many 
of our writers have been disposed to hold in 
abeyance their claims to an earlier origin, and 
to say that it was a matter of no consequence, 
but there was no evidence attainable of the 
existence of Baptist churches between the 
fourth and the eleventh or twelfth centuries. 

To the writer it has seemed to be a matter 
of great consequence to be able to demonstrate 
that there were churches of faithful witnesses 
for Christ who had never paid their homage 
or given in their allegiance to the anti-Chris- 
tian churches of Constantinople or Eome. 
Even in idolatrous Israel, in the reign of its 
worst king, Ahab, the despairing prophet was 
told by Jehovah, "Yet I have left me seven 
thousand in Israel, all the knees which have 
not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which 
hath not kissed him." Was it possible that 



PEEFACE. y 

among these many millions of misguided souls 
who had given themselves over to the delu- 
sions of the Greek and Roman churches, there 
was not at least, as large a proportion, who 
had not been partakers in the sins of these 
anti- Christian churches, but had washed their 
robes and made them white in the blood of 
the Lamb? 

It was true that both the Greek and Ro- 
man churches had put the brand of heresy 
on every sect which had dared to deny their 
dogmas ; but might it not be that beneath 
that brand could be discerned the linea- 
ments of the Bride of Christ? 

My attention was first called to the possi- 
bility of discovering more than had hitherto 
been known in regard to these early Protest- 
ants of the Eastern lands some two years 
since, while engaged in some studies for a 
work on the Eastern Question. In the Chris- 
tian churches of Armenia, Bulgaria, and Bos- 
nia I believed were to be found the churches 
which from the fifth to the fifteenth century 
were the true successors of the churches found- 
ed by the apostles, in all matters of faith and 
practice. The " Historical Review of Bosnia," 



10 PREFACE. 

contained in the second edition of Mr. Arthur 
J. Evans' work on Bosnia in 1876, first opened 
my eyes to the wealth of the new historical 
discoveries thus brought to light in Bosnia 
and Bulgaria. Mr. Evans is a member of the 
Church of England, an eminent scholar, thor- 
oughly devoted to archaeological investigations, 
and had made very patient and successful re- 
searches on this very subject. While he had 
explored the libraries of Mostar and Serajevo, 
as well as of the Greek and Roman Catholic 
convents throughout Bosnia and the Herze- 
govina, I found that a considerable portion 
of his facts were gleaned from two recent his- 
torical works — Herr Jirecek's Geschichte der 
Bulgaren (Berlin, 1876), and ^M. Hilferding's 
Serben und Bulgaren, originally published in 
the Sclavonic language, but translated into 
German in 1874. Jirecek is a Bohemian, and, 
I believe, a Roman Catholic, but a man of 
great fairness. Hilferding is a Russian, and 
attached to the Greek Church. Both treat 
largely (as they are under the necessity of 
doing) of the Bogomils, as these early Chris- 
tians were called, since their history is very 
largely the history of the two nations for five 



PREFACE. 11 

or six centuries. Both writers give very mi- 
nute descriptions of the faith and life of these 
people, and most of the historical facts given 
in the following pages are derived from them. 
But wherever Mr. Evans could find anything 
in the early secular or ecclesiastical writers of 
the Dark Ages or mediaeval times bearing on 
this subject he has carefully gleaned it, even 
though it were but a single sentence. This 
has been done, on his part, solely from a love 
6t archaeological research, for he has evident- 
ly no special sympathy with the people about 
whom he writes; but he is entitled to the 
praise of manifesting a judicial fairness as 
between them and their persecutors. 

My own labor on the subject has not been 
confined to the verification of Mr. Evans' 
quotations and references, but has extended 
in certain directions which he had left un- 
touched, such as a careful study of all those 
affiliated sects whose connection with the Bo- 
gomils he had demonstrated, and the tracing 
up, so far as possible, all hints in regard to 
their special tenets. Among these I have 
found, often in unexpected quarters, the most 
conclusive evidence that these sects were all, 



12 PEEFACE. 

during their earlier history, Baptists, not only 
in their views on the subjects of baptism and 
the Lord's Supper, but in their opposition to 
Psedobaptism, to a church hierarchy, and to 
any worship of the Virgin Mary or the saints, 
and in their adherence to church independ- 
ency and freedom of conscience in religious 
worship. In short, the conclusion has forced 
itself upon me that in these " Christians " of 
Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Armenia we have an 
apostolic succession of Christian churches, Nelv 
Testament churches, and Baptist churches, and 
that as early as the twelfth century these 
churches numbered a converted, believing 
membership as large as that of the Baptists 
throughout the world to-day. I have chosen 
in the narrative to present only the facts ascer- 
tained, without making any deductions from 
them. They are so plain that the wayfaring 
man can comprehend their significance. In 
the Appendix (II.) I have endeavored to 
summarize these facts and to show their sig- 
nificance to Baptists. I now offer the whole 
as a humble contribution to Baptist church- 
history. L. P. B. 
Brooklyn, N. Y., February 1, 1879. 



THE BOGOMILS 



BULGARIA AND BOSNIA. 



SECTION I. 

The Armenian and other Oriental Churches. 

The wars which from time immemorial have 
devastated the fair lands of Eastern Europe and 
Western Asia have had in most cases a religious 
basis. At first, in pagan times, the worshippers 
of the gods of the hills attacked the adherents 
of the gods of the valleys or of the plains ; later, 
the devotees of Bel or Baal made war upon the 
worshippers of the one living and true God. 
When Christianity became the religion of the 
state, its emperors and generals turned their 
arms against the pagan Avars and Bulgarians, 
or, full as oft, upon those Christian sects which 
from their purer worship were denominated her- 
etics by the orthodox. This condition of war- 
fare on religious grounds has continued through- 

2 13 



14 EAELY PEOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

out all the centuries of the Christian era, even 
down to our own time, sometimes assuming the 
form of a fierce and bloody persecution against 
the protesting churches who refused obedience 
to the Roman or the Greek Church, and some- 
times raging in terrible conflict against the 
Turk. Even in the war recently in progress, 
the cross of the Greek Church was arrayed 
against the Mohammedan crescent. 

It is, however, only one division of this series 
of religious conflicts which specially concerns 
us — that which relates to the power claimed 
by the self-styled orthodox Greek and Roman 
churches to put down, by force and bloodshed, 
every form of faith which they were pleased to 
denounce as heresy. 

No sooner was the Christian church, by the 
conversion of Constantine, relieved from the 
pressure of persecution, than its bishops and 
leaders began to magnify what it had previously 
regarded as trifling errors into heretical dog- 
mas which threatened not only the peace, 
but the very existence, of Christianity. The 
Bishop of Rome, the Bishop of Alexandria, 
the Bishop of Carthage, and the Bishop of 
Nicomedia were ranged against each other in 



EARLY PEOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 15 

hostile array; council succeeded council; the 
emperor sided now with Arius and now with 
Athanasius — first with the iconoclasts and 
next with the makers and worshippers of 
images; and in a few years the followers of 
the Prince of peace were wielding the weapons 
of a carnal warfare against each other. These 
hostilities and conflicts continued through the 
following centuries, until they culminated in 
the separation of the two bodies in the East 
and in the West, since known as the orthodox 
Greek and the Roman Catholic churches. 

But these two churches, differ as they might, 
had yet many points in common. Their great- 
est differences were that the Greek Church ad- 
hered somewhat more strictly to the early 
forms of the primitive and apostolic church in 
its ordinances and ritual, and that it did not 
recognize the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. 
Both paid divine honors to the Virgin Mary ; 
both addressed their prayers and homage 
to saints and angels; both used pictures, 
icons, statues, and crucifixes in their worship; 
and both denounced as heretics all who dif- 
fered from them in belief. By both, also, the 
churches of the remote East were regarded as 



16 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 






fountains of heresy. The Roman Church con- 
sidered them as guilty of all the seven mortal 
sins, and the Greek Church proclaimed, that 
for those who continued in these heretical 
doctrines there was no forgiveness in this 
world nor in the world to come. 

And what were these fearful heresies ? The 
positive doctrines of their belief are hard to 
trace, since they are only recorded in the ac- 
cusations of their bitterest enemies. They 
probably differed considerably in different 
periods. There had come down to most of 
these churches from the old Aryan inhabit- 
ants of Persia some of the dogmas which had 
distinguished them, surrounded as they were 
by idolaters, in their maintenance for more 
than three thousand years of a purely theis- 
tic worship. These Aryans, like their de- 
scendants, the Parsees of the present day, 
held to two principles which governed this 
world and all worlds — the good principle, 
called also Ormuzd, and the evil principle 
or spirit, which they named Ahriman. Both 
they believed to be subordinate to the Great 
First Cause, who dwelt in the light unap- 
proachable and had delegated nearly equal 



EARLY PKOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 17 

power to these two spirits. There is room 
for admiration that these thoughtful sages, 
without the light of revelation, should have 
approached so close to the truth as they did, 
and yet the great problem of the entrance of 
sin into the world, and the self-evident fact of 
its continued existence and its terrible effects, 
might well, in the absence of purer light, have 
led them to this belief in dual divinities. 

When the religion of Jesus Christ was re- 
vealed to these Orientals by the preaching of 
the apostles and their followers and the dif- 
fusion of a few manuscript copies of the Gos- 
pels, and, later, of the other books of the New 
Testament, it is not surprising that they should 
have recognized in Jesus the Ormuzd of their old 
faith, and in Satan their evil spirit, Ahriman, 
and, for want of better instruction, should have 
attributed to them the qualities, powers, and 
functions which their reformers and prophets 
had assigned to the two principles; nor that 
some of the other fictions of their older faith, 
so dear to Oriental minds, should have clung 
to their new doctrines, through the slow-moving 
centuries, till they were displaced by the clearer 
light of Revelation. 

2* B 



18 EAKLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

SECTION II. 

Dualism and the Phantastic Theory of our 
Lord's Advent in the Oriental Churches. — 
The Doctrines they Rejected. — They held 
to Baptism. 

As a matter of history, we find that most 
of the Oriental churches, and indeed some of 
those of Asia Minor which had been founded 
by the apostles, were permeated with these 
dualistic doctrines, though in different de- 
grees. It would not be far from the truth 
were we to say that there have been traces of 
it among the most evangelical churches of all 
the ages since, even down to our own time. 
As to the doctrines which they did not be- 
lieve, the evidence is more satisfactory. They 
honored the Virgin Mary as the mother of our 
Lord according to the flesh — though there were 
different opinions even on this point — but they 
refused any worship to her as a divine or super- 
human being. True to their old Aryan train- 
ing, they repudiated alike picture and icon, 
statue and image, crucifix and crosier. They 
recognized no bishop or high priest; their el- 
ders served them in their simple ritual, and 



EAELY PEOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 19 

expounded to them the word of God. The 
initiatory rite of their faith has been to some 
extent a matter of dispute; with nearly all 
there is ample evidence that it was, as in the 
Greek Church, an immersion in water, though 
probably not a trine immersion, and without 
the anointing and other ceremonies. 

But many of their enemies, overlooking the 
fact that all their members received baptism 
on their admission into the church, because it 
was not attended with the ceremonials and ad- 
juncts of the Greek Church, have spoken of 
their ceremon}^ of ordaining and setting apart 
their elders and " perfect ones " as a spiritual 
baptism, called by them consolamentum, and ad- 
ministered by the simple imposition of hands. 1 
The denial of their practice of water-baptism 
is due solely to this misapprehension. The 
strictness and ascetic character of their doc- 
trines led them to prohibit all architectural 
display. Their churches were simple, plain, 
barn-like buildings, without tower, steeple, or 
bell. They knew nothing of nave, transept, 
chancel, or altar. The bare walls of the room 
had no ornaments; rude seats accommodated 
the worshippers ; a table covered with a white 



20 EAKLY PBOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

cloth, on which lay a copy of the New Testa- 
ment, or, if they were unable to obtain this, 
the Gospel of St. John, sufficed instead of 
pulpit for their elder. 2 

At first, with but limited instruction, and 
with only a small portion of the New Testa- 
ment in their hands, there is no reason to 
doubt that their doctrinal views, whether 
measured by the standard of the Christi- 
anity of those times or of our own, were in 
some respects heretical. The leaders of the 
Paulicians in the fifth and sixth centuries 
are reputed to have held these opinions: 
that God had two sons ; that the elder, whom 
they called Satanael, had been at first en- 
dowed with all the attributes of deity and 
was chief among the hosts of heaven ; that by 
him, through the power bestowed upon him 
by the Father, the material bodies of the 
universe — suns, moons, and stars — were cre- 
ated, but, in consequence of his ambition and 
rebellion, he was driven from heaven, and 
took with him the third part of the heavenly 
host. Then, they said, God bestowed the 
power on his younger son, Jesus, whom he 
made the heir of all worlds, and gave him 






EAKLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 21 



the power over all spiritual intelligences. 
Satanael had created our earth, but Jesus 
breathed into man the breath of life, and he 
became a living soul. Thenceforth there was 
a constant conflict between Satanael and Jesus. 
The former compassed the death of the latter 
after his assumption of the human form and 
nature, but by this very act Satanael secured 
his own defeat, for Jesus rose from the dead, 
the conqueror over his great enemy and all 
his foes, and was received into heaven in 
triumph, having redeemed by his death all 
who should trust in him. 3 We see in this 
system of doctrine — which it is only right to 
say comes to us through their enemies — many 
traces of the old dualistic theory of the good 
and the evil spirits, but the whole is illumined 
by a brighter and better hope — that of the 
speedy triumph of the right and the good — 
than ever cheered the heart of Zartusht or 
gleamed from the pages of the Zendavesta. 



• 



22 EAKLY PKOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

SECTION III. 

Gradual Decline of the Dualistic Doctrine. — 
The Holy and Exemplary Lives of the Paul- 
icians. 

As the years gathered into decades and the 
decades into centuries, and the number of 
copies of the Scriptures was multiplied and 
carefully studied by these diligent and simple- 
minded inquirers after truth, their views of 
the divine revelation became clearer, their 
doctrines more scriptural, w T hile their lives 
were as pure as ever. Well might they as- 
sume the title of Cathari — " the pure " — from 
that beatitude of our Lord which they had 
from the first made their motto and their rule 
of life : " Blessed are the pure in heart ; for 
they shall see God." Even their bitterest 
enemies and persecutors could not deny their 
exemplary character, however strongly they 
might denounce their want of reverence for 
images and icons, and their abhorrence of 
Mariolatry. More than once their foes, even 
in the act of persecution, were, like St. Paul, 
converted to their faith and became their 
leaders and martyrs. But their pure and 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 23 

blameless lives did not in the least degree 
protect them from cruel persecutions. They 
had become very numerous among the Ar- 
menians and the inhabitants of the Caucasus 
region, and as early as the beginning of the 
sixth century a considerable number of their 
leading men had sealed their testimony at 
the stake, victims of weak or dissolute em- 
perors goaded to persecution by the persua- 
sions or threats of ambitious and unscrupu- 
lous bishops. « 

Occasionally, when the emperor happened 
to be himself an iconoclast, or destroyer of 
the statues, images, icons, sculptures, and bas- 
reliefs which abounded in all the churches 
which had sanctioned the Eastern or Greek 
ritual, there would be a temporary lull in the 
persecution, as was the case when Constantine 
V. (" Copronymos," as the monks derisively 
called him) ascended the throne in 741, and 
signalized his acceptance by a general on- 
slaught upon the statues and pictures of the 
Greek churches; but even he so far sympa- 
thized with the general hostility to the " Paul- 
icians " — the name which their enemies then 
gave them — that he transplanted a large col- 



24 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

ony of them to Thrace that they might vex and 
annoy his heathen subjects, the Bulgarians, a 
mixed race, part Tartar and part Sclavonian. 
But this movement, if it was intended as a 
punishment, failed of effect. The Armenian 
Paulicians won their way to the hearts of their 
heathen neighbors and converted great num- 
bers of them to their own faith, and such was 
the influence of their pure and exemplary 
lives upon the emperor, that in the later years 
of his long reign he too was considered a Paul- 
ician. 4 But on the accession of his son, Leo 
IV. (775-780), and still more under the re- 
gency and rule of the ambitious but infa- 
mously cruel Irene, his widow, the images and 
pictures were restored to the churches and the 
relentless persecution of the Paulicians was 
renewed. Irene was dethroned and banished 
in 802, but the persecuting disposition con- 
tinued amid the frequent changes of rulers 
till 815, when Leo V. for five years renewed 
the rule of the image-breakers, and the Paul- 
icians had a brief period of rest. For the next 
twenty-two years foreign wars attracted the 
attention of the emperors — Michael II. and 
Theophilus — from very active persecution. 






EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 25 

SECTION IV. 

The Cruelty and Bloodthirstiness of the Em- 
press Theodora. — The Free State and City 
op Tephrice. 

On the death of Theophilus his empress, 
Theodora, became regent (her son, Michael 
III., being but five years of age), and for fif- 
teen years ruled with a rod of iron. It is a 
remarkable fact that the empresses and em- 
press-regents of these Byzantine dynasties were 
always more .cruel, destructive, and persecut- 
ing in their dispositions than the emperors. 
Theodora was no exception to this rule. She 
restored the images and pictures, convened a 
council of bishops at Nicsea, which she com- 
pelled to register her edict for the maintenance 
of these idolatrous pictures in the churches, 
and then turned her whole energies to the 
destruction of the Armenian Paulicians. She 
issued her decree that all her subjects should 
conform to the Greek Church, and when the 
Armenians refused she sent her armies into 
their land, put to death, either by the sword 
or the stake, over one hundred thousand 
Paulicians (some accounts say two hundred 

3 



26 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

thousand), and drove the remainder into 
exile. 5 

Satisfied at last that this cruel queen (whose 
private life was as infamous as her rule was 
imperious and despotic) meant nothing less 
than their utter extermination, the Armenians 
rose in rebellion, having as their leader a brave 
Paulician named Carseas, asserted their inde- 
pendence, and after driving Michael III. and 
the usurper Bardas out of Armenia and threat- 
ening Constantinople, established the free state 
of Tephrice with absolute freedom of opinion 
for all its inhabitants. 6 From the capital of 
this free state, itself called Tephrice, 7 went 
forth a host of missionaries to convert the 
Sclavonic tribes of Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Ser- 
bia to the Paulician faith. Great was their 
success — so great that a large proportion of 
the inhabitants of the free state migrated to 
what were then independent states beyond 
the emperor's control. The free state of Teph- 
rice declined for some years, and finally be- 
came extinct by the emigration of most of 
its inhabitants and the surrender of the re- 
mainder to the Saracens. The times were not 
propitious to its permanence — for a higher in- 






EARLY PKOTESTANTS OP THE EAST. 27 

telligence than then existed among the masses 
is essential to the existence of a free state — 
but it had lasted sufficiently long to demon- 
strate that the religious basis is the best on 
which to found a state, and that it was possi- 
ble for a nation to exist while maintaining 
perfect religious freedom. More than seven 
hundred years later these problems were 
wrought out with a grand success on the 
coasts of a land in the far West, of whose 
existence no man then dreamed, the mo- 
tives which prompted the establishment of 
a free state being the same in the latter as 
in the former case, and the doctrines pro- 
fessed by these exiles for their faith differ- 
ing very slightly. 



SECTION V. 



The Sclavonic Development of the Catharist, 
or Paulician, • Churches. — Bulgaria, Bosnia, 
and Serbia its Principal Seats. — Euchites, 
Massalians, and Bogomils. 

We have now reached a stage in the his- 
tory of these Cathari, or Paulicians, when 



28 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

their movement takes a new departure. Hith- 
erto it has been mainly of Armenian origin ; 
henceforward it becomes Sclavonic. Bulga- 
ria has become an independent state — an 
empire, indeed — taking in both banks of the 
Danube and extending northward into what 
is now Southern Russia, and southward almost 
to the gates of Constantinople. More than 
once its czars, as its rulers were called, had 
knocked so loudly at those gates that the fee- 
ble successors of Constantine started back with 
affright, and were ready to buy a peace by 
the payment of great sums of money. Two 
thousand pounds of gold, or nearly four hun- 
dred and fifty thousand dollars of our money 
(a vast sum in those days), was the tribute 
annually paid by one of these emperors to the 
Bulgarian czar. On the west and north-west 
three other independent states were rising 
into prominence — Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. 
Their inhabitants were Sclavonians, and their 
government, at first patriarchal, had gradually 
taken on monarchical forms, till, though usu- 
ally in accord, each state was practically inde- 
pendent; and for the most part all acted in 
concert with the semi-Sclavonic empire of 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 29 

Bulgaria in resisting the inroads of the Greek 
emperors. Later they united, now under a 
Serbian, now under a Bosnian, and anon un- 
der a Hungarian, leader in fighting the Turk. 
Already, in the beginning of the tenth cen- 
tury, these independent states, and especially 
Bosnia, had been considerably leavened with 
the Paulician doctrine, to which its enemies, 
though never weary of denouncing them as 
Manichseans, about this time began to apply 
a new name, that of Bogomils or Bogomiles, 
while the Bulgarian writers called them also 
Massalians and Euchites. There are various 
explanations of the origin of these names, 
the most plausible being that they are sub- 
stantially the same name translated into the 
Syriac, Greek, and Sclavonic languages. The 
term Massalians is said to be derived from a 
Syriac word signifying " those who pray," 
and the Greek Euchites has a similar mean- 
ing; while Bogomil is thought to be derived 
from the Bulgarian Bog z'milui, signifying 
"God have mercy." Prayer being the most 
characteristic act of the Bogomilian worship, 
as well as of the sects with which it was allied, 
this derivation has the merit of probability as 

3* 



30 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

well as of tradition. 8 Another tradition men- 
tions a Bulgarian elder or pope (the Sclavonic 
term for priest) named Bogomil. This is a 
possible Bulgarian name, and answers to the 
German Gottlieb or the Greek Theophilus, each 
signifying " beloved of God." 

The believers in these doctrines, it should 
be observed, never called themselves by any 
of these names, and had even dropped that of 
Cathari, which at an earlier period they had 
assumed. They called themselves simply 
" Christians," 9 and it must be confessed that 
they did more honor to the name than any 
of their persecutors. 



SECTION VI. 

The Bulgarian Empire and its Bogomil Czars. 

The doctrine had during the tenth century 
taken deep root in Bulgaria and Servia. The 
czar Samuel, the most illustrious ruler of the 
Bulgarian Empire, was himself a convert to 
the faith, while of one of the early Serbian 
princes, St. Vladimir, it is recorded that he 
was the zealous enemy of the Bogomils, 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 31 

though his son Gabriel and his wife were 
members of that sect. From its first intro- 
duction into these countries the professors of 
the Bogomilian faith, under whatever names 
they were known, had been active propa- 
gandists and missionaries, and their success 
was the more remarkable from the extreme 
simplicity of their ritual and their absolute 
avoidance of all appeals to the sensuous ele- 
ment in human nature. Though Bulgaria 
and Servia were at this time independent 
states, at least so far as the Byzantine Empire 
was concerned, the state churches were in 
accord with the Church of Constantinople, 
and acknowledged their allegiance to the 
Greek Patriarch. Whatever we may think 
now of Byzantine architecture, the gorgeous 
ornamentation of the churches within and 
without, their chimes of bells, their pillars, 
porticoes, naves, transepts, and chancels of 
the most costly marbles and syenites, their 
altars resplendent with jewels, the sacred 
paintings and sculptures glowing with color 
which adorned the walls, the air heavy with 
the odor of precious incense, and the richly- 
robed priests and bishops who chanted and 



32 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

intoned the service, — were all, it would have 
seemed, so attractive to the Oriental taste, 
with its love of beauty and of sensuous de- 
lights, that no simpler and ruder service 
would have commanded their attention for a 
moment. 



SECTION VII. 



A Bogomil Congregation and its Worship. — 
Mostar, on the Narenta. 

But let us picture to ourselves (and we have 
ample authority for the picture) a Bogomilian 
assembly at the close of the tenth century. We 
will choose for our location the ancient town 
of Mostar, in the Herzegovina, which was one 
of the principal seats of the new doctrine. 
Along its streets on the Lord's Day a com- 
pany of plainly-dressed Bosniacs wend their 
way toward one of the narrow side streets of 
the town. They are met at every turn by 
gayly-dressed men and women, who are on 
their way either to the Greek church or to the 
theatre, and who are laughing, shouting, and 
apparently in the highest spirits; yet they 
move forward deliberately but determinedly 



EAKLY PEOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 33 

across Trajan's beautiful bridge, which spans 
with a single arch of stone the swift and rocky- 
channel of the Narenta, toward a plain, barn- 
like structure, whose rude stone walls and 
thatched roof give no indication that it is a 
temple for the worship of the Most ^High. 
They all enter, and the spacious room, with 
its bare walls and its rude benches, is soon 
filled. No pillars sustain the comparatively 
low ceiling ; no pictures, bas-reliefs, or sculp- 
tures adorn the walls or attract the attention 
of the worshippers. There is no altar radiant 
with gold and color, no screen for the choir, 
no pulpit even for the officiating minister ; but 
at the rear of the room a plain table covered 
with a white linen cloth, and having upon it 
a manuscript copy of the New Testament, and 
a roll on which are inscribed some of the grand 
and inspiring hymns of the apostolic church, 
furnish the only indications of the place of the 
leader of the congregation. By the side of the 
table sits an old man whose white locks fall 
upon his shoulders. His plain dress — that of 
the Bosniac farmer of that time — does not differ 
from that of the other men in the congregation. 
His fine intellectual face is hidden by his hand, 
c 



34 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

and his attitude and manner indicate that he 
is engaged in silent prayer. Presently he rises 
from his seat, kneels reverently — his example 
being followed by all the congregation — and 
utters with evident sincerity and fervor a brief 
prayer full of feeling and evincing a spirit of 
devotion w T hich shows that he at least is wor- 
thy of the name of Bogomil — "the man who 
prays." 

At the conclusion of the prayer the whole 
congregation join him in reciting the Lord's 
Prayer, closing with an audible "Amen." He 
next commences chanting, in a voice of won- 
derful melody, some one of those hymns of 
the early church with which Bunsen, in his 
Hippolytus, has made us so familiar — hymns 
doubtless sung by the apostles, and believers 
of their time. He then reads a portion of 
the New Testament history. Laying down 
the precious manuscript, he proceeds to un- 
fold to his eager hearers the character and 
life of the incarnate Jesus. He tells of his 
poverty, his sufferings, his rejection by men, 
his crucifixion, his reappearance in a more 
glorious beauty and with a more manifest 
power; of his six weeks' stay upon earth 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 35 

in this semi-glorified condition, and of his 
return to heaven amid a throng of attendant 
angels and saints; and as he portrays him 
as the Redeemer, the Abolisher of death, and 
the Conqueror over the Spirit of evil, his eye 
grows brighter, his tall and commanding form 
is raised to its full height, and, gazing upward 
as if, like Stephen, he saw the heavens opened, 
he breaks forth in that sublime chant of the 
twenty-fourth Psalm : " Lift up your heads, 
ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting 
doors, and the King of glory shall come in." 
The congregation, deeply moved, chant in the 
same tones the response, "Who is this King 
of glory?" and the elder, again taking up the 
strain, replies, "The Lord strong and mighty, 
the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, 
O }^e gates, even lift them up, ye everlasting 
doors; and the King of glory shall come in;" 
and as the congregation again respond, "Who 
is this King of glory?" he answers, in sweet but 
powerful tones, "The Lord of hosts, he is the 
King of glory." Returning, after this episode, 
to his discourse, the elder describes in such 
glowing terms the bliss and glory of the heav- 
enly state, the joys of the redeemed, the worth- 



36 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST.' 

lessness of all earthly honors or comforts, and 
the insignificance of the trials and persecutions 
of the present life in comparison with the glory 
that shall follow, that his hearers are quite lift- 
ed above all earthly cares or disquietudes. In 
all this there is no appeal to the sensuous ele- 
ment ; the heaven he describes is not Moham- 
med's paradise — not even the glowing and ra- 
diant " city of our God " which Chrysostom so 
eloquently portrayed — but a heaven so spirit- 
ual, so pure, and so holy that none but the 
pure in heart can ever hope to attain unto it. 
With another fervent repetition of the Lord's 
Prayer, in which all the congregation join, 
adding their earnest "Aniens," the people dis- 
perse. In the after-part of the day, as the sun 
declines to the West, they again assemble for 
w r orship and prayer, many of the congregation, 
and among them some of the older women, par- 
ticipating in the prayers. The reverent repeti- 
tion of the Lord's Prayer (the presbyter Cosmas 
says five times on each Lord's Day) constituted 
an important feature of their services. 10 






EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 37 

SECTION VIII. 

The Bogomilian Doctrines and Practices. — The 
Credentes and Perfecti. — Were the Credentes 
Baptized ? 

What was the daily life of these people, 
and what their relations to each other and to 
the communities in which they lived? The 
question can only be answered by the testi- 
mony of their adversaries — testimony which 
we may be certain will not be too favorable 
to them. 

They had taken upon them the name of 
Christians — followers of Christ. 11 Did they 
honor that name more than the so-called 
orthodox members of the Greek and Latin 
churches? Let us scan the evidence. 

It is agreed by all the writers who speak 
of them that their membership was divided 
into two classes, the Perfecti, or pure ones, and 
th6 Credentes, or believers. The Perfecti were 
never very numerous. In 1240, when the 
Bogomilian doctrines had spread over all Eu- 
rope and the number of believers, or Credentes, 
could not have been less than two millions 
and a half, and may have exceeded three 



38 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

millions, Reinero Sacconi, or, as Hallam and 
other English writers call him, Regnier, the 
inquisitor, the best informed of their enemies, 
who had himself been at one time a member 
of the sect, estimates the number of the Per- 
fecti as not exceeding four thousand. 12 These 
were their leaders, or elders, and their devout 
women. They went forth to teach by twos, 
like the seventy sent out by Christ. They 
were required to remain in a state of celibacy 
and could not hold any property, these re- 
quirements being probably intended to make 
their journeyings and itinerant labors less try- 
ing and to secure their undivided consecration 
to their work. The pretence that they regard- 
ed marriage and the possession of property as 
mortal sins is a fiction of their enemies, as 
their whole history proves. This relinquish- 
ment of property on the part of the Perfecti 
they regarded as the fulfilment of Christ's in- 
junction to the young ruler (Matt. xix. 21) : 
41 If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou 
hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have 
treasure in heaven ; and come and follow me." 
They were also to lead ascetic lives, to eat only 
vegetables and fish, and to fast rigidly at cer- 



EAKLY PKOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 39 

tain seasons of the year. They had peculiar 
signals for recognizing each other, and their 
support was contributed by the Credentes, or 
believers. They received the title of elders, 
and, in addition to their duties as preachers 
and pastors of the congregations, and mission- 
aries to other lands, they alone had power to 
administer the consolamentum, or rite of initia- 
tion into the ranks of the Perfecti. This was 
done by the laying on of hands of the elders, 
by means of which they believed that the Holy 
Spirit, the Comforter, descended upon those on 
whom hands were laid, and thenceforth they 
too were elders and missionaries. The rites 
by which believers were received into the 
ranks of the. Credentes are not specified by 
their adversaries; it is certain, however, that 
baptism — i. e., immersion, for the Oriental 
churches had no other conception of baptism 
than immersion — was the principal, and per- 
haps the only, one. We give below our rea- 
sons for coming to this conclusion.* There 

* This question of the baptism of the members of the 
Bogomil, or Paulician, Church as the initiatory rite to 
membership among the Credentes has been very fiercely 
discussed by ecclesiastical writers, and not always in the 



40 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

was a covenant often entered into by the be- 
lievers to receive the consolamentum at the ap- 

best temper. Our reasons for believing that it was al- 
ways administered are the following: 

1. Their well-known and universally-admitted repu- 
diation of infant baptism, and their often quoted declara- 
tions that the Credentes should only comprise those who 
professed personal faith in Christ as their Saviour. The 
profession was made in some public way, and was evi- 
dently not made by the imposition of hands, as that was 
confined to the Perfecti, or celibate disciples, and was a 
personal consecration to a specific ministry. This pro- 
fession of faith was also a prerequisite to participation 
in the Lord's Supper. 

2. The omission of any mention of this by the pres- 
byter Cosmas, Zygabenus, and others is not an argument 
against it, for they, as ecclesiastics of the Greek Church, 
recognized nothing as baptism except the trine immer- 
sion of infants, with its accompaniments of unction, 
naming after one of the saints, and invocation to the 
saints and the Virgin Mary; and, as all these were re- 
pudiated by these humble Christians, they would natu- 
rally declare that they did not practise baptism. But, 
per contra, Harmenopoulos, a Greek priest of the twelfth 
century, expressly declares that they did practise single 
immersion, but without unction, etc., and only upon 
adults, on the profession of their faith. He adds that 
they did not attribute to it any saving or perfecting vir- 
tue, which is in accordance with their other teachings. 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 41 

proach of death, and there is abundant evi- 
dence that they celebrated the Lord's Supper 
— though without giving it any mystic signifi- 
cation — whenever it was possible, every Lord's 
Day. Women were admitted to the ranks of 
the Perfect^ but they too were required to lead 
celibate lives and to practise abstinence from 
meats; they seldom preached, though they 
often took a part in public worship. More 
than six hundred years before the organiza- 

3. Reinero, the inquisitor, who had originally been 
one of them, says : " They say that a man is then first 
baptized when he is received into their community and 
has been baptized by them, and they hold that baptism 
is of no advantage to infants, since they cannot actually 
believe." 

4. We find in the histories of Jirecek and Hilferding 
numerous incidental allusions to the baptism of persons 
of high rank, such as the ban Culin Tvartko III, King 
Stephen Thomas, the Duke of St. Sava, etc., who never 
advanced beyond the grade of Credentes, but who are 
said to have been "baptized into the Bogomil faith." 
That during the period of their greatest persecutions 
the ordinance was administered secretly, and perhaps at 
night, is very probable, but there is no evidence that it 
was ever omitted, much less that any other mode was 
substituted for it. That would have been impossible in 
an Oriental church. 13 

4* 



42 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

tion of any sisterhood analogous to the Sis- 
ters of Charity in the Roman Church these 
holy women, the deaconesses of the Bogo- 
mil churches, devoted their whole time to 
ministering to the sick, to visiting and aid- 
ing the poor, to teaching the young the rudi- 
ments of their faith — establishing thus in their 
Lord's Day instruction the first Sunday-schools 
in the Christian church — to administering in 
extreme cases the consolamentum to the dying, 
and to teaching the ignorant, and especially 
young girls, the rudiments of learning and the 
way of salvation. Like the brethren of the 
Perfecti, they went forth to their work in cou- 
ples. The Credentes, or believers, were for a 
period of nearly four centuries the merchants, 
the traders, the agriculturists, and, to a consid- 
erable extent, the nobles and officials of Bul- 
garia and Bosnia. 



% EAKLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 43 

SECTION IX. 

The Orthodoxy of the Greek and Roman 
Churches rather Theological than Prac- 
tical. — Fall of the Bulgarian Empire. 

It was a period when infinitely more stress 
was laid upon the doctrines which a man be- 
lieved than upon the life which he led. The 
questions were not, " Is a man chaste ? Is 
he truthful? Is he honest and upright? 
Does he love his neighbor as himself? Do 
his good deeds proceed from right and pure 
motives ?" but, " Does he believe that the Vir- 
gin Mary is divine and should be worshipped? 
Does he worship and pray to the saints ? Is 
he willing to have icons and pictures of the 
Virgin and the saints in his house and in his 
church? Does he believe that Christ had 
one will or two, and one nature or two ? If he 
holds that Christ was divine, does he think 
that his divine nature was similar to, or iden- 
tical with, that of the Father? Is there a 
purgatory ? And if so, can the priest by his 
masses bring the faithful out of it ? ,? 

Since the Bogomils did not, or could not, 
answer these questions of dogma to the satis- 



44 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

faction of the bishops and emperors, they 
were denounced as " worse and more horrible 
than demons," and he who killed them 
thought he did God service. Yet now and 
then one of their bitterest persecutors was 
compelled to acknowledge that their lives were 
pure and chaste, that they were honest and 
truthful, kind to their neighbors, and ob- 
servant of all the ethics of the moral law. 14 
"Would that our orthodox believers were 
half as exemplary on these points !" says 
one of their enemies bluntly. But all this 
was regarded as of no importance so long as 
they were such heretics in regard to the doc- 
trines of the church. And so the strong arm 
of persecution was stretched out against them 
whenever kings, princes, or emperors could 
be found to permit it. While under the rule 
of their native princes the Bogomils of Bul- 
garia suffered comparatively little from perse- 
cution. The czars of Bulgaria were humane 
and merciful ; and, though the Bulgarian 
Church, founded by Cyrillus and Methodius, 
was in most respects a copy of the Byzantine, 
yet there is reason to believe that others of 
the czars besides Samuel turned with a feeling 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 45 

of relief from the florid and tasteless display 
of the Greek ritual to the simple and fervent 
worship of the " Christian " churches. 

But, alas! after an independent existence 
of more than one hundred and fifty years, 
during most of which time it had maintained 
a constant warfare with the Byzantine Empire 
and carried terror and dismay more than once 
to the very gates of Constantinople, the Bul- 
garian kingdom fell, in the beginning of the 
eleventh century, before the prowess of Basil- 
ius II., one of the emperors of the Mace- 
donian dynasty, and was annexed to the 
Byzantine Empire as a province. From the 
time of this annexation the edicts of perse- 
cution seem to have been issued against the 
harmless Bogomils, but the revolutions and 
counter-revolutions of the next seventy years 
in the Eastern Empire, during which time 
fifteen emperors ascended the throne, left 
little opportunity for active- efforts to put 
them down. 



46 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

SECTION X. 

The Emperor Alexius Comnenus and the Bogo- 
mil Elder Basil. — The "Alexiad" of the 
Princess Anna Comnena. 

In a. d. 1081, Alexius Comnenus I. — not the 
first of the Comnenus dynasty, but the first 
who took that name as 'a part of his title — 
ascended the throne, and during his reign 
of thirty-seven years persecution of all those 
whom he regarded as heretics was carried on 
without any scruples of conscience, or any 
regard to honor or decency. Alexius had a 
daughter, the princess Anna Comnena, who, 
with a most inordinate share of vanity, pos- 
sessed much of her father's cruel and malig- 
nant nature. After her father's death and the 
defeat of her conspiracy to secure the throne 
for herself and her husband she turned her 
attention to literature, and wrote the Alexiad, 
a history of her father's reign, which has 
been preserved, like the fly in amber, for its 
very worthlessness, and gives us some idea 
of the events of that time. In this book she 
has left an account of the persecutions of the 
Bogomils. 



EAKLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 47 

The leader of the sect at this time was a 
venerable physician, Basil by name, whose 
pure life and eloquence in the exposition of 
his doctrines had given him great influence 
in Bulgaria. An ascetic in his life, and, like 
all the elders, a celibate and without world- 
ly possessions, he had supplied his few and 
simple needs by the practice of the medical 
profession. The princess Anna unblushingly 
narrates how her father set a trap to decoy 
this venerable man into the toils already laid 
for . him, inviting him to the imperial table 
and luring him on to an exposition of the 
doctrines of the Bogomils by pretending a 
deep interest in them and a willingness to 
embrace their views; how he brought him 
into the imperial cabinet and had a long 
interview with him — of which she professes 
to have been a witness — in which he artfully 
drew from him a still more full statement 
of their views on all controverted points, as 
well as the secrets of the sect, if there were 
any, and then, suddenly throwing aside the 
arras on the wall, revealed the scribe who 
had taken down the confession of what he 
termed his heresy, and beckoned to the ap- 



48 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST, 

paritors — officers of the court — to come for- 
ward and put his guest in irons. 

Here this delicate princess drops into 
coarseness and scurrility. She can find no 
fault in the character, the life, or the con- 
duct of this apostle of the Bogomils, who 
seems, even from her own account, to have 
borne himself with a dignity and lofty cour- 
age which should have made his imperial 
betrayer and persecutor utterly despise him- 
self. But, in default of this, she ridicules 
his personal appearance and that of his fol- 
lowers — though she is obliged to acknow- 
ledge that they included members of many 
of the families of the highest rank — and 
pours out her venom on his doctrines and 
declarations, of which, however, she seems 
to have no very clear comprehension. "Ba- 
sil himself," she tells us, "was a lanky man 
with a sparse beard, tall and thin." "His 
followers," she says, "were a mixture of 
Manichees and Massalians." This was a 
slander, so far as the Manichaeism was con- 
cerned, which their enemies never tired of 
uttering, though very few of them seem to 
have known what the doctrines taught by 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 49 

Manes really were. She prates of "their un- 
combed hair, of their low origin, and their 
long faces, which they hide to the nose, and 
walk bowed, attired like monks, muttering 
something between their lips." She de- 
nounces their doctrines, as explained by 
Basil, as being most heretical and blasphe- 
mous, though she does not seem to have un- 
derstood them, but, "what was more shockiifg 
still, he called the sacred churches — woe is 
me! — the sacred churches, fanes of demons." 
When he saw himself betrayed b}^ the em- 
peror he declared " that he would be rescued 
from death by angels and demons." This is 
perhaps a perversion of the passage (Acts 
xxvii. 23, 24) where Paul in circumstances 
of great peril said, " For there stood by me 
this night the angel of God, whose I am 
and whom I serve, saying, Fear not, Paul; 
thou must be brought before Caesar;" or of 
that blessed passage in the Psalms, quoted by 
our Lord : " He shall give his angels charge 
concerning thee, and in their hands they shall 
bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy 
foot against a stone;" or possibly of that par- 
able of the rich man and Lazarus, in which 
5 D 



50 EARLY PKOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

our Lord tells us that Lazarus was carried by 
the angels unto Abraham's bosom. 



SECTION XI. 



The Martyrdom of Basil. — The Bogomil 
Churches Keinforced by the Armenian 
£aulicians, under the Emperor John Zi- 
misces. 

Even in this scurrilous report there is 
brought before us one of the grandest scenes 
in the whole history of martyrs for the faith. 
This old man, with his long white hair and 
beard, suddenly finding himself betrayed by 
a most villainous plot of the imperial dastard 
before him, with his hands fettered and the 
full consciousness that martyrdom in its 
most cruel form was his doom, yet utters 
no reproach against his persecutor, but with 
a sublime faith looks up to heaven, and de- 
clares that he shall be borne to his home 
above by the angels of God, the ministers 
who do his will. 

Turning away from this scene of ecstatic 
faith, we find ourselves compelled, not with- 






EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 51 

out loathing, to look over the pages of the 
record of this princess, who tells us daintily, 
after a vast expenditure of billingsgate, U I 
should like to say more of this cursed heresy, 
but modesty keeps me from doing so, as beau- 
tiful Sappho says somewhere ; for though I am 
an historian, I am also a woman, and the most 
honorable of the purple, and the first offshoot 
of Alexius." Then, having gratified her vanfty 
with this boasted modesty, she goes on to de- 
scribe, in all its horrible details, the burning at 
the stake of this glorious martyr and those of 
his brethren whom Alexius, the head of the 
Greek hierarchy, had been able to capture 
either by force or guile. We cannot bring 
ourselves to lay before our readers the de- 
scription she gives so minutely and with 
such evident enjoyment of the preparations 
for the holocaust in the hippodrome — the 
crackling of the fire and the shrinking of 
the poor human bodies wasted by fasting, 
but still sustained by unfaltering trust in 
their Saviour as they come nearer to the 
flames, the turning away of their eyes, and 
finally the quivering of their limbs as the 
fire scorched and shrivelled their flesh. 15 



52 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

Can it be, one asks in amazement, that a 
woman of high rank, and for her time of 
remarkable culture — a woman, too, professing 
to be a follower of Christ — can thus gloat 
over the tortures of a martyr for conscience' 
sake? Even the fiends of the pit would 
blush for shame over such a monster of 
cruelty. 

The Bulgarian Bogomils were unquestion- 
ably more rigidly dualistic in their doctrines 
than those of Bosnia, Serbia, and the Herze- 
govina. There is also some reason to believe 
that they held to what the old theologians 
called " the phantastic theory of the incar- 
nation of Christ" — L e., that his body here 
on earth was a phantasm, and not a real body. 
This was due to several causes. These Bogomils, 
Paulicians, or Christians of Bulgaria had been 
largely reinforced by repeated migrations and 
transplantations from Armenia and the Cau- 
casus, where the doctrine of the two prin- 
ciples had been first professed in a form most 
nearly allied to that of the Zendavesta. Even 
as late as the latter part of the tenth century 
the emperor John Zimisces brought great 
numbers of these Armenians from their native 



EARLY PKOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 53 

country and planted them in Eoumelia and 
Thrace. 16 Their abhorrence of the licentious- 
ness, falsity, treachery, and bloodthirstiness 
of those who ministered at the altars and 
were the heads of the Greek hierarchy, who 
worshipped in the gaudy temples of the 
Greek Church, caused them to cling with 
greater tenacity to the doctrines of their 
fathers. It was also true that only portions 
of the Scriptures had, even as late as the 
twelfth century, been translated into either 
the Bulgarian or the Armenian tongue; and 
so thoroughly had the persecutions and trials 
they had endured from the Greek Church led 
them to distrust everything Greek, that very 
few of them could speak or . read the lan- 
guage in which the whole Scriptures were 
extant. The manuscript copies, even of the 
books of the Bible, which were to be had in 
Bulgarian and Armenian were very few, and 
many of their places of worship were only 
supplied with the Gospel of John. 

5* 



54 EAKLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

SECTION XII. 

The Purity of Life of the Bogomils. — Their 
Doctrines and Practice. — Their Asceticism. 

Yet it is remarkable, notwithstanding the 
two great errors they were charged with enter- 
taining, that their practical Christianity and 
their belief in the essentials of a true faith 
were so sound. The name " Christian " was 
not to them one of trivial or doubtful import : 
it comprehended a reverence for God and 
adoration of him as the Father and Source 
of all good ; a holy and abiding trust and 
belief in Jesus as the Son of God — a divine 
Being who had made an atonement for their 
sins, and through whom alone salvation was 
possible — and in a Holy Spirit, or Comforter, 
who would teach, lead, and guide them in the 
way of all truth. It comprehended also very 
frequent and devout prayer — not to angels 
or saints or the Virgin Mary, but to Jesus — 
for guidance and strength, and a constant 
watchfulness and resistance against all temp- 
tation of the evil one ; and finally, it included 
holy living, obedience to God's commands, 
the maintenance of that filial spirit which 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 55 

could come to God as a little child comes to 
its father, and in their intercourse with their 
fellow-men the observance of chastity and 
purity, the avoidance of desecration of the 
Lord's Day, theft, violent anger, murder, false- 
hood, evil-speaking, and covetousness. In 
short, though their theology might have been 
unsound in some points, their Christianity was 
spotless, and they were " epistles of Christ, 
known and read of all men." 

We have already noticed some of the dog- 
mas of the Greek Church and of the Latin 
Church which they denied; the presbyter 
Cosmas — a Greek priest who lived at the end 
of the tenth century, and a bitter enemy — shall 
furnish us with others. Of their vigorous de- 
nunciation of the worship of the Virgin Mary, 
of worship and prayers to the saints, and of 
images, icons, and pictures of the Virgin and 
the saints, enough has been said. But they 
also opposed the use of crucifixes, crosses, bells, 
incense, ecclesiastical vestments, and every- 
thing which contributed to pomp and cere- 
mony in the worship of God. They ridiculed 
alike the dogmas of transubstantiation and 
consubstantiation, and denied that the Lord's 



56 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

Supper had any mystic significance. It was, 
they said, a memorial service which the 
Founder of Christianity had instituted to 
commemorate his sacrifice of himself for the 
sins of the world, and all true believers should 
partake of it in both kinds — not as conferring 
any saving grace, but as a token of their re- 
membrance of him and of their gratitude for 
his redemptive work. They did not admit 
any idea of purgatory, but believed that those 
who died in Christ entered into rest — a bliss- 
ful state, but not the state of the highest feli- 
city, to which they might only attain after the 
first resurrection. They were very severe in 
their denunciation of the wanton, profligate, 
and ungodly priests and other dignitaries of 
the church, whose impure and unholy lives 
were in such marked contrast to those of their 
self-denying and ascetic elders. The tendency 
to asceticism among them was strong, as it al-, 
ways is among a persecuted and conscientious 
people. Their elders subsisted on vegetables 
and fish only ; they held no property, had no 
home, no wife or child. In some instances, as 
in the case of Basil, they sustained themselves 
by their own labor ; in others, and especially 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 57 

in the case of missionaries, they were sustain- 
ed by their brethren, the believers, who did 
not enter upon the condition or take the vows 
of the Perfecti This ascetic and abstemious 
life was as far removed as possible from the 
seclusion, the fastings, flagellations, exposure 
to the weather, and hermit or desert life of 
the stricter orders of monks and nuns in the 
Greek and the Roman churches. The devout 
women also who had entered upon this higher 
life of self-denial were sustained in their labors 
among the sick, the poor, and the ignorant by 
the contributions of the believers. Nor was 
this an onerous task. Their number was small 
— not more than one or two in the thousand 
of believers — and their needs were but trifling. 
There was no pauperization in this, nor was 
it regarded in the light of a charity by either 
the givers or the recipients. 17 



58 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

SECTION XIII. 

The Missionary Spirit and Labors of the El- 
ders and Perfecti. — The Entire Absence of 
any Hierarchy. 

The spirit of propagandism — or, as it would 
be both more true and more kindly to call it, 
the missionary spirit — was very active in them. 
It is to Bulgarian rather than Bosnian mission- 
aries that the earlier forms of dissent from the 
Church of Rome are due. The Albigenses — 
so called from the province where they first 
appeared in considerable numbers — and the 
Patarenes — probably from the name of a sub- 
urb of Milan in which they were very numer- 
ous — were the spiritual descendants of the 
Bulgarian Bogomils and the first-fruits of 
their missionary zeal. Their other missionary 
work was mostly performed in Croatia, Walla- 
chia, Moldavia, and the provinces which now 
form the southern portion of Russia in Eu- 
rope. In many cases the congregations estab- 
lished by them affiliated at a later day,- and 
with a more enlightened faith, with those es- 
tablished by the Bosnian Bogomils. They 
had no organized hierarchy. When their 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 59 

numbers became large the elder most highly 
esteemed in a province or country appointed 
or called to the work twelve apostles, or mes- 
sengers, who went forth two and two to their 
work, but with equal powers, rights, and priv- 
ileges with the elder himself; and if he found 
it necessary, he called forth "other seventy 
also." These were all from the ranks of the 
Perfect^ but among the believers, there were 
often those who, prompted by religious zeal, 
devoted themselves to Christian work. In the 
end most of these received the imposition of 
hands, which initiated them into the official 
body. 18 

This simple organization was very probably 
drawn from the civil organization of the Scla- 
vonic tribes. Among these the patriarch, who 
was the father and ruler of a numerous house- 
hold, became, as his influence widened, by the 
voluntary selection of his equals, the zupan, or 
elder, of a commune, and one of these zupans, 
by the choice of his fellow-zupans, became the 
grand zupan, or elder, of his tribe or province, 
with the chance of being called to the still 
higher station of ban (prince), or czar (chief ruler 
or king). But in the Bogomil eldership there 



60 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

was nothing analogous to the Latin archbishop 
or pope, or the Greek archimandrite, patriarch, 
or metropolitan. In the thirteenth century, 
when there were in Western Europe thir- 
teen provinces of believers all tracing their 
origin to the Bogomils of Bosnia and Bulga- 
ria and numbering some millions of believers, 
all affiliated with their brethren of those coun- 
tries, though the Bosnian chief elder might 
be regarded as the wisest councillor in their 
ranks, he possessed no more ecclesiastical au- 
thority than the youngest elder of the most 
distant and feeblest province. 19 



SECTION XIV. 

The Bogomil Churches in Bosnia and the Her- 
zegovina. — Their Doctrines more thoroughly 
Scriptural than those of the Bulgarian 
Churches. — Bosnia as a Banate and Kingdom. 

Let us now turn to Bosnia and the Herze- 
govina, or, as it was called about this time, the 
Principality of Chelm. The introduction of 
the Bogomil doctrines was not effected in 
most of this region till the early part of the 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 61 

tenth century, and they did not take deep root 
there till toward the close of the eleventh cen- 
tury. By that time, however, the whole coun- 
try was very thoroughly leavened with them, 
though there had not been any persecution in- 
stituted against them. The orthodox church of 
Bosnia had been from the first more Sclavonic 
than Greek. It had originated from the labors 
of Cyrillus and Methodius, and, though accept- 
ing in general the dogmas of the Greek Church 
and its gorgeousness of architectural decora- 
tion and ecclesiastical display, its Scriptures, 
psalter, and ritual were in the •Sclavonic, and 
not in the Greek, tongue. 20 It had manifested, 
up to the twelfth century, none of the perse- 
cuting spirit of the Greek or the Roman Church. 
It had wavered in its allegiance, now recogniz- 
ing the pope as the head of the church, and 
anon manifesting by its services and its dog- 
mas a preference for the Eastern Church, though 
it had no sympathy for the Byzantine rulers or 
people. 

The Bosnians — or Bosniacs, as they call them- 
selves — had, after the Sclavonic fashion, elected 
their zupans from the patriarchs of the com- 
munes, or the groups of villages, and their 



62 EAELY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

grand zupan, whom they as early as the be- 
ginning of the tenth century had begun to call 
ban — i. e., prince or grand duke — from the 
zupans or chiefs of their groups of villages. 
They were practically independent, acknow- 
ledging in some great emergency, as of war or 
territorial acquisition, now the Ban of Croatia, 
anon the Grand Zupan of Servia, and perhaps 
a little later the King of Hungary, as over-lord 
or suzerain, and following one or other to the 
battle-field. But in time of peace this suzer- 
ainty amounted to very little. At no time from 
the beginning of the tenth century were they 
the acknowledged subjects of the Byzantine 
emperor. If his generals succeeded in subdu- 
ing the over-lord under whose banners they 
had last marched, they transferred their fealty 
to another over-lord who was not subdued, or 
remained in their mountain-fastnesses, which 
the Byzantine troops, enervated by luxury, 
found inaccessible. 

In 1138, Bela II., King of Hungary, under 
this nominal suzerainty attempted, at the in- 
stance of the pope, to make a raid against the 
Patarenes — one of the names which the popes 
bestowed upon the Bogomils — in the country 



EAELY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 63 

between Cetina and Narenta. 21 These names of 
places or districts indicate that the region vis- 
ited was in the Herzegovina and Montenegro 
rather than in Bosnia proper. This expedi- 
tion seems to have accomplished nothing. 
The pope was occupied with other wars and 
crusades against heresy, and the Hungarian 
king — whose real name was Coloman, though 
he reigned under the title of Bela II. or Geiza 
II., Bela or Geiza being the royal patronymic 
of that period in Hungary — was soon engaged 
in a war with Manuel I., one of the ablest of 
the Byzantine emperors ; and in this war, which 
continued for a long time, the Hungarian king 
w r as powerfully aided by his natural son, Bo- 
rig, who had been chosen ban of Bosnia. 



SECTION XV. 



Bosnian History Continued. — The Good Ban 
Culin. 

On the death of Borig, in 1168, his son, 
known in Bosnian history as the good ban 
Culin, became the ban, or ruler, of Bosnia. His 
reign extended over thirty-six years — years 



64 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAS1. 

of peace, quiet, and prosperity to his country. 
The recent war with the Byzantine emperor, 
as well as the preference of the Hungarian 
kings for the Latin rite, had inclined both 
Bela III., who was now on the Hungarian 
throne and the acknowledged suzerain of 
Bosnia, and his chief vassal, the ban Culin, 
to acknowledge the superior claims of the 
Papacy. For the twelve years which followed 
Culin's accession to the throne of Bosnia the 
pope, Alexander III., was too busy in fighting 
the anti-popes of that period to do much in 
the way of suppressing heresj r ; and mean- 
while, Culin, at first considered a dutiful son of 
the Church of Rome, had lapsed into the her- 
esy of the Bogomils, and with his wife* and 
his sister, who was the widow of the Count of 
Chelm (the modern Herzegovina), had sub- 
mitted to baptism and been numbered among 
the Credentes, or believers. 22 Pope Alexander 
III., on hearing of this departure from the 
faith, at once exerted such a pressure upon 
the ban through his suzerain, the King of 

* Culin had married a sister of Stephen N^manja, Ban 
of Serbia, whose Bogomilian opinions were notorious be- 
fore her marriage. 23 



EABLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 65 

Hungary, that he recanted from his Bogomil 
doctrines, appearing, it is said, in person at 
Kome with his recantation not later than the 
early part of a.d. 1181. 

Whether the corruptions which were even 
then prevalent at Rome disgusted him, or the 
persuasions of his wife and sister were too 
strong to be resisted, we know not; but it is 
certain that within a few years the ban Culin 
was reported to Pope Innocent III. as having 
relapsed into his former errors and as having 
infected at least ten thousand of his subjects 
with his heresy. 24 This was in 1199. The 
next year it was reported that Daniel, the 
Roman Catholic bishop of Bosnia, had joined 
the Bogomils or Patarenes, and, soon after, 
that the Roman Catholic cathedral and epis- 
copal palace at Crescevo had been destroyed 
by the heretics. For many a year thereafter 
there was no Roman Catholic bishop of Bos- 
nia. 25 

The pope w r as furious. He appealed to the 
King of Hungary to punish his heretic vassal. 
But Culin was too strong to fear the Hunga- 
rian armies, and the Hungarian king was too 
well aware of his strength to venture any 
6 * E 



66 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

attempt to coerce him. And thus it came to 
pass that while Western Europe was devas- 
tated by De Montfort in his crusade against 
heretics, the banat of Bosnia afforded a secure 
asylum to persecuted adherents of the Bogo- 
milian heresy from all parts of Europe. 



SECTION XVI. 

The Growth of the Bogomil Churches under 
Culin.— Their Missionary Zeal and Success. 

For the hundred years ending with A. d. 
1220 the Bogomils of Bosnia had been very 
active in missionary work. They still affilia- 
ted to some extent with their brethren in Bul- 
garia, though they had greatly modified their 
views concerning the origin of the two prin- 
ciples of good and evil, and no longer held to 
the phantastic theory of the incarnation, but 
conformed to the present orthodox views of 
the human nature of Christ, and accepted the 
Old Testament in its entirety. But though 
their theology was elastic and comprehended 
somewhat differing views, their Christianity 
was pure, simple, and stern as ever. The Al- 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 67 

bigenses, and probably some of the earlier 
Catharist churches, had been the converts of 
Bulgarian missionaries; but the Waldensian 
congregations, the believers of the plains of 
Lombardy and the South of France, the 
Catharists of Spain, the early Reformers of 
Bohemia, the " Ketzers " of the Lower Rhine, 
the Publicani (a corruption of Pauliciani) of 
Flanders and England, were all the followers 
and disciples of the Bogomilian elders or djeds 
of Bosnia. Reinero Sacconi — or Regnier, as 
the English historians call him — an Italian 
apostate of the beginning of the thirteenth 
century, who, having been one of the Bogo- 
milian Oredentes, had recanted and, uniting 
with the Roman Catholic Church, become an 
inquisitor, states that the churches of the 
Cathari, as he calls them, numbered then as 
many as thirteen bishoprics, or rather elder- 
ships — for they did not recognize the name 
of bishop — that of Bosnia ' or Sclavonia be- 
ing the most important and the parent of 
the others. These elderships were scattered 
through all the countries of Europe, and ex- 
tended in an unbroken zone from the Black 
Sea to the Atlantic and from the Mediter- 



68 EAELY PEOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

ranean to the Baltic. 26,27 They had penetrated 
into England and made their appearance in 
Oxford and its vicinity in 1160. Henry II., 
then on the English throne, called a council, 
and on its finding, issued a decree that the 
Publicani should be branded on the forehead 
with a red-hot key, publicly whipped and 
thrust forth from the city, and that nobody 
should give them food or shelter. The poor 
wretches, the historian adds, owing to the rigor 
of the season and the sentence, sunk under 
the punishment, and were all dispatched. 



SECTION XVII. 

The Authorities from whose Testimony this 
Narrative is Drawn. — Its Thorough Corrob- 
oration by a Cloud of Witnesses. 

These are not hasty generalizations, con- 
founding sects essentially distinct with each 
other, and giving them a common origin of 
which they were ignorant, as some of the 
ecclesiastical historians have pretended, but 
well-authenticated facts, every link in the 
chain of evidence being attested by reputa- 






EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 69 

table witnesses. The German ecclesiastical 
writers Gieseler, Neander, Mosheim, and 
Schmidt had collected many facts on this 
subject, as had also Gibbon in his Decline and 
Fall of Rome, and Hallam in his State of Eu- 
rope during the Middle Ages, but Mr. A. J. 
Evans, in his recent monograph on the his- 
tory of Bosnia, has with great labor and re- 
search made an exhaustive study of the whole 
subject, and has brought the most conclusive 
proofs of the derivation of all these early 
Protestants from a common source, and that 
source the Bogomils of Bosnia and Bulga- 
ria. Jirecek, a recent Bohemian writer on Bos- 
nia and Bulgaria, and Hilferding, a Russian his- 
torian of Serbia and Bulgaria, under which he 
includes Bosnia, both adduce official evidence 
of the affiliation of the Bogomils with the 
Waldenses, the Bohemians, and the Moravians, 
as well as of their identity with the " Poor 
Men of Lyons," the Vaudois, the Henricians 
and the so-called heretics of Toulouse, the 
Patarenes of Dalmatia and Italy, the Petro- 
brussians, the Bulgares or Bougres, and the 
Catharists of Spain. Matthew Paris, Roger 
of Hoveden, and Ralph of Coggeshale, three 



70 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

of the most renowned of the early British 
chroniclers, 28 testify to their presence in large 
numbers at this period in Toulouse, in Pro- 
vence, in Flanders, and in England, and that 
they were called in the latter two countries 
Publicani or Poplicani, a corruption of Paul- 
iciani. All these writers trace them directly 
or indirectly to their origin in Bosnia; and 
Matthew Paris and Ralph of Coggeshale, trust- 
ing probably to the misrepresentations of some 
of the Romish inquisitors, relate that the Al- 
bigenses, Waldenses, and other heretics of 
France, Spain, and Italy had a pope of their 
own, who resided in Bosnia, that he created 
a vicar (apostolic ?) in Toulouse whose name 
was Bartholomew, and that these heretics 
went annually to consult their Bosnian pope 
on difficult questions of faith and doctrine. 
The Bosnian djed, or chief elder, may have 
enjoyed some sort of actual primacy in conse- 
quence of his age, experience, and more pro- 
found acquaintance with doctrine, and had 
probably sent some of the Bosnian elders as 
missionaries to Toulouse; but in so doing 
he could not have claimed any ecclesiastical 
authority, as a hierarchy of any sort was utter- 






EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 71 

ly abhorrent to the spirit and temper of both 
the Bogornils and their affiliated sects in the 
West. A careful and critical examination of 
the civil and ecclesiastical histories of this pe-> 
riod in England, France, and Germany affords 
abundant corroborative evidence of the origin 
of all these sects from the Bosnian churches, and 
of the complete identity of the doctrines pro- 
fessed by them all. Under the fierce persecutions 
instituted against the Waldenses, Catharists, 
etc., of Western Europe by the popes in the 
twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centu- 
ries, we have the testimony of the popes them- 
selves that very many of the Waldenses, Pa- 
tarenes, Publicans, etc., took refuge with their 
brethren in Bosnia, which at that time was 
protected by the good Ban Culin. 29 * 

* Ralph of Coggeshale goes into considerable detail of 
the doctrines of the Publicani in Flanders and England, 
and thereby establishes their complete identity with the 
Bogornils. They held, he says, to two principles — of good 
and evil; they rejected purgatory, prayers for the dead, 
the invocation of saints, infant baptism, and the use of 
pictures, images, and crucifixes in the churches ; they ac- 
cepted, of the New Testament, only the Gospels and the 
canonical Epistles (here he was certainly misinformed) ; 
they insisted, in their prayers and all their worship, on 



72 EAELY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

SECTION XVIII. 

The Era of Persecution. — The Crusades against 
the bogomils. — the archbishop of colocz. 

We return from this digression to an account 
of what befel the Bogomils of Bosnia after the 
death of "the good Ban Culin." After his 
decease, which occurred in 1205, the King of 
Hungary, wishing to pacify Pope Innocent 
III., procured the election of Zibisclav, a Scla- 
vonian, but a strict Roman Catholic, as Ban of 
the use of the vulgar tongue; their elders and perfect 
ones, both men and women, observed a vegetable diet and 
condemned marriage. In this connection he relates a 
most shameless and cruel story told him by Gervase of 
Tilbury, then clerk of the Archbishop of Rheims, subse- 
quently an historical writer. This profligate clerk relates 
to him how, having failed to seduce a beautiful country- 
girl, he perceived her heresy, accused her successfully 
before the Inquisition of being one of the Publicani, and 
feasted his eyes with her dying agonies at the stake. Even 
the hardened monk Ralph cannot refrain from adding that, 
" girl though she was, she died without a groan ; as illus- 
trious a martyr of Christ (though for a different cause) as 
any of those who were ages before slain by the pagans for 
their Christian faith." It must have been an heroic cour- 
age and faith indeed which could draw forth such an 
encomium from a monkish narrator. 



EABLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 73 

Bosnia. But the pure lives, the honesty, in- 
tegrity, and industry, of the Bogomils, were too 
much for this Roman Catholic Ban, and he be- 
came a convert to the hated sect. There were 
peace and quiet in Bosnia till 1216, when the 
learned and gentle Pope Honorius III., having 
ascended the papal throne, believing that these 
heretical Bogomils could be convinced of their 
heresies by argument, sent the accomplished 
subdeacon Aconcius to Bosnia to labor for 
their conversion. But the arguments of the 
eloquent subdeacon proved no more efficacious 
than those of his predecessors: the heresy 
grew and increased, like the waters of Noah's 
flood, continuously. Northward and north- 
westward, in the provinces of Croatia, Dal : 
matia, 'Istria, Carniola, and Sclavonia, which 
had hitherto been strongly Roman Catholic, 
the number of converts multiplied daily, while 
at home they were fast becoming the dominant 
power. 

In this emergency the Archbishop of Colocz, 
in Hungary, stood forth as a defender of the 
Romish faith. Armed with authority from 
the pope and the Hungarian king, he entered 
Bosnia in 1222 at the head of a host of Hunga- 
7 



74 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

rian Catholics, and used the sword with such 
good effect that he had shortly possessed him- 
self of the provinces of Bosnia, Ussora, and 
Soy. The Ban Zibisclav, who seems to have 
possessed very little of the Sclavonic pluck, 
notwithstanding his Sclavonic origin, was com- 
pelled to abjure his errors, and, falling humbly 
at the feet of the pope, Gregory IX., received 
from him an embrace; in return for which 
he professed to be willing to dedicate to his 
service his person, his lands, and all the 
goods he at that time possessed. This was 
in 1233. 

The subjects of the Ban were not inclined to 
be included in this abject surrender. The vio- 
lent persecution which had raged for eleven 
years had not terrified them, though it had sub- 
jugated their Ban, and their answer to their 
persecutor was the erection of more places of 
worship and the setting apart of a greater 
number of djeds, or elders, both for home 
and missionary work. Pope Gregory IX. was 
enraged at the boldness of these heretics. Pro- 
vence had been overrun and purged of its here- 
sies, the Waldenses had been driven into the 
fastnesses of Piedmont, and should he be thus 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 75 

flouted by these Serbian Bogomils? It was 
not to be thought of for a moment. A new 
crusade was proclaimed, and Coloman, Ban of 
Sclavonia and brother of the King of Hungary, 
was to lead it. In 1238 he entered Bosnia with 
a large army to exterminate the heretics. The 
weak and treacherous Zibisclav permitted with- 
out protest or resistance the havoc and devas- 
tation which this ruffianly crusader made 
among his best subjects. Coloman "purged" 
— so they called it — the whole kingdom, and 
extended his ravages through the principality 
of Chelm, which formed the south-western por- 
tion of the present Herzegovina. No trouba- 
dour has sung, no historian has recorded, the 
barbarities and atrocities of this war of ex- 
termination: we only know that many thou- 
sands were enrolled among the glorious army 
of martyrs, and that from under the altar, the 
souls of them that were slain for the word of 
God and for the testimony which they held, 
uttered again their cries for vengeance on the 
cruel persecutor of the saints. Pope Greg- 
ory IX., in 1240, congratulated Coloman on 
"wiping out the heresy, and restoring the 
light of Catholic purity;" but ere his death, 



76 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

in 1241, he had discovered that his congratu- 
lations were premature. 

The Tartar invasion of 1241, which weakened 
the power of Hungary, and in which the cru- 
sader Coloman and the base coward Zibisclav 
both fell on the* field under the fierce assault 
of the Khan Ugadai, relieved the Bogomils 
from persecution for a time. 30 



SECTION XIX. 



Further Crusades. — The Hostility of Pope Inno- 
cent IV. — More Lenient, but not more Effect* 
ive, Measures. 

In 1246, Pope Innocent IV. found that there 
was need of a third crusade in Bosnia, and 
again it was entrusted to an archbishop of 
Colocz. " A man skilled in all the science of 
war," King Bela IV., aided him in his im- 
pious work. He butchered many heretics and 
cast thousands into dungeons, and succeeded 
in persuading the pope that his deserts were so 
great that the Roman Catholic see of Bosnia 
was transferred from the archiepiscopal diocese 
of Spalato to that of Colocz. But his tri- 
umphs were of short duration. A bishop had 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 77 

been established in Bosnia after the first cru- 
sade, in 1240, and had maintained his episco- 
pal authority, not without difficulty, till 1256, 
but then it lapsed a second time. The Bogo- 
niils were still in the ascendency, and the 
Hungarian suzerainty was no longer potent 
in the affairs of Bosnia. 

The popes Alexander IV., Urban IV., and 
Clement IV., perhaps more enlightened, and 
certainly more politic, than their predeces- 
sors, abandoned their method of converting 
the Bogomils by fire and sword, and resorted 
to persuasion. The Dominican and Francis- 
can friars were established in Bosnia between 
1257 and 1260, and argument and entreaty 
took the place of violence. Still there was no 
Roman Catholic bishop of Bosnia, nor did 
persuasion prove more effective than force. 

There is nowhere any record among the 
persecutors of these cruelly-harassed Bogomils 
that they rose against their persecutors, or 
that when, as was often the case, they tempo- 
rarily attained to power, they ever sought to 
persecute in turn, or to do any injury to those 
who had so often and so deeply injured them. 

If they are to be regarded as Christians who 

7* 



78 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

follow the example of the Lord Christ, who, 
when he was reviled, reviled not again, and 
suffered in patience the contradiction of sin- 
ners, are not these humble and patient souls 
to be reckoned as eminently entitled to that 
honored but much-abused name? 



SECTION XX. 



The Establishment of the Inquisition in Bos- 
nia. — The Lettek of Pope John XXII. — Pre- 
vious Testimony of Enemies to the Purity 
of the Lives of the Bogomils. 

About 1275, Bosnia passed under the over- 
lordship of the King of Serbia, Stephen Drag- 
utin, and his successor, Milutin Urosh II. 
The latter was favorable to the Romish 
Church, and in 1291 allowed two Franciscan 
brothers to .establish the Inquisition in Bos- 
nia. But at first the jaws of this terrible 
wild beast were muzzled. For a period of 
about sixty years the Bogomil churches had 
rest, and, like those in apostolic times, 
"walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the 
comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied." 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 79 

After this season of peace and quiet the 
hand of the persecutor was raised against 
them more violently than ever. The Hun- 
garians had once more regained their ascend- 
ency in Bosnia, and the Romish authority 
was re-established there. In June, 1325, the 
pope, John XXII., wrote two letters, one to 
Charles, King of Hungary, the other to Ste- 
phen Kotromanovic, Ban of Bosnia. The let- 
ter is still extant, and bears date at Avignon. 
The following is a literal translation of it : 

" To Our Beloved Son and Nobleman, 
Stephen, Prince of Bosnia: Knowing that 
thou art a faithful son of the church, we there- 
fore charge thee to exterminate the heretics 
in thy dominions, and to render aid and as- 
sistance unto Fabian, our inquisitor, foras- 
much as a large multitude of heretics, from 
many and divers parts collected, hath flowed 
together unto the principality of Bosnia, trust- 
ing there to sow their obscene errors and to 
dwell there in safety. These men, imbued 
with the cunning of the Old Fiend and armed 
with the venom of their falseness, corrupt the 
minds of Catholics by outward show of sim- 
plicity and lying assumption of the name of 



80 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

Christians ; their speech crawleth like a crab 
and they creep in with humility, but in secret 
they kill and are wolves in sheep's clothing, 
covering their bestial fury as a means whereby 
they may deceive the simple sheep of Christ." 31 

How terrible the danger that these ravenous 
lambs would tear and destro}^ the meek, gen- 
tle, and timid wolves of the Inquisition ! 

This was not the first time that the Bogo- 
mils had been accused of hypocritical meek- 
ness and gentleness. Three centuries before, 
the presbyter Cosmas had said, "When men 
see their lowly behavior, then think they that 
they are of true belief; they approach them, 
therefore, and consult them about their souls' 
health. But they, like wolves that will swal- 
low up a lamb, bow their head, sigh, and 
answer full of humility, and set themselves 
up as if they knew how it is ordered in hea- 
ven." And to the same purport, Euthymius, 
the scribe of Alexius Comnenus, w T ho fur- 
nished the evidence on which the Bulgarian 
elder was sent to the stake, says of them: 
I " They bid those who listen to their doctrines 
to keep the commandments of the gospel, 
and to be meek and merciful and full of 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 81 

brotherly love. Thus they entice men on by 
teaching all good things and useful doctrine, 
but they poison by degrees and draw to per- 
dition." We could hardly ask for stronger 
evidence than these hostile popes and priests 
supply of the purity of the lives and doctrines 
of those whom they persecuted. 



SECTION XXI. 

Further Persecution. — A Lull in its Fury 
under the serbian czar, stephen dushan. — 
The Eeign of the Tvart-ko Dynasty. 

The appeal to the King of Hungary and the 
Ban of Bosnia did not fail of effect. The per- 
secuting edicts went forth in 1330 ; the inquis- 
itor plied his satanic arts, and once more " the 
lilies of the field," as their elders were wont to 
call them, were trampled under foot. Many of 
their leaders and elders, as well as the believers, 
were burned or driven from the realm, and all 
the horrors of the old crusades were repeated. 
# But all the zeal of the inquisitor Fabian, sec- 
onded by his royal coadjutors, did not suffice 
to materially diminish their numbers. 

In 1337, Pope Benedict XII., who had suc- 
F 



82 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

ceeded John the Persecutor, made the discov- 
ery that Bosnia was as full of heresy as ever, 
and endeavored to start a fourth crusade 
against the Bogomils of Bosnia, calling to 
his aid the Bans of the adjacent states and 
the King of Hungary ; but the Hungarian 
power was again waning, and the powerful 
Serbian czar, Stephen Dushan, was already 
reducing the adjacent banats to subjection. 
Availing himself of these facts, the Ban, 
Stephen Kotromanovic, who seems to have 
been a shrewd ruler, was able to divert 
them from their purpose. 

In 1340 the Czar Dushan had assumed the 
over-lordship over Bosnia, what is now the 
Herzegovina, Croatia, Rascia, Sclavonia, Ru- 
thenia, Dalmatia, and a part of Hungary. 
Dushan had no sympathy with the Church 
of Rome, but he was content to let things re- 
main as they were. The monks made great 
efforts to convert the Bogomils, even pro- 
fessing to work miracles for that purpose, and 
the inquisitor tried and burned all he dared. 

The Serbian over-lordship came to an end 
in 1355, with the death of Dushan, and the 
Ban, Stephen Kotromanovic, busied himself 






EAKLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 83 

for the next three years with the effort to 
gain as his vassals some of the states which 
after the death of Dushan had broken off 
from the suzerainty of Serbia. He secured 
an over -lordship over the principality of 
Chelm (a part of the Herzegovina) and the 
banats of Eascia and Zeuta (the present 
Montenegro). 

In 1358, Stephen Tvart-ko, a nephew of 
Louis the Great of Hungary, succeeded to 
the throne of the banat, and by his rare tact 
and ability added to his sway as vassals 
the Princes of Chelm and Zeuta, the Ban of 
Dalmatia, the Zupans of Canali and Tribunja. 
In 1376 he wrested from his uncle Louis the 
permission to assume the title and state of 
King of Bosnia. He aspired to still higher 
honors. He hoped to unite under his sole 
dominion all the Sclavonic states of the Bal- 
kan, and to rule as Czar over a wide and 
powerful empire. His lineage and that of 
his queen were connected with the reigning 
families of all the neighboring states, and, as 
the legitimate heir of several of these fam- 
ilies, he had a claim on this extended sov- 
ereignty. In his reign of thirty-three years 



84 EARLY PEOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

he included under his sceptre a larger terri- 
tory than any other Bosnian ban or king. 
His administration was distinguished by wis- 
dom and toleration. He was no theologian, 
and in his own personal belief leaned alter- 
nately to the Greek and the Roman Catholic 
churches, but his toleration of the Bogomils 
was steady, persistent, and generous. During 
his reign they were free from persecution, 
though the Franciscan friars complained to 
Pope Urban V. in 1369 that he was the 
protector of the Patarenes, and the pope 
attempted in vain to stir up his enemies 
against him, writing to the King of Hungary, 
his uncle, that King Tvart-ko, "following in 
the detestable footsteps of his fathers, fosters 
and defends the heretics who flow together 
into those parts from divers corners of the 
world as into a sink of iniquity." 32 The 
hopes which he had entertained of extended 
empire were- crushed by the great and fatal 
battle of Kossovo, in 1389, and he died in 
1391, greatly lamented, though his last days 
had been clouded by misfortunes. 

The toleration of the Bogomils was contin- 
ued during the short reign of Tvart-ko II. 



EARLY PROTEST ANTS OF THE EAST. 85 

(1391-1396), and increased during the long 
reign (1396-1443) of his successor, Tvart-ko 
III., surnamed u the Just," who, together with 
the principal magnates of his realm, was an 
adherent to the Bogomil faith. During the 
long period of eighty-five years the demands 
and threats of the popes were of little avail. 
Though the reign of Tvart-ko III. was for a 
time disturbed by civil disorders, and there 
were at one time two, and at another three, 
princes professing to be kings of Bosnia, he 
was at no time so weak as to fear the incur- 
sions of the allies of Rome. 33 



SECTION XXII. 

The Reformation in Bohemia and Hungary a 
Bogomil Movement. — Renewal of Persecution 
under Kings Stephen Thomas and Stephen 
Tomasevic — The Pobratimtsvo. 

During this period the Bogomils, availing 
themselves of all their opportunities for mis- 
sionary work, were sending aid and encourage- 
ment to their brethren in Bohemia and Hun- 
gary, and the Reformation under John Huss 
and Jerome of Prague was avowedly a Bogo- 



86 EARLY PROTESTANTS OP THE EAST. 

mil movement. At this time also their leaders 
were men of such learning and culture that 
Pope Pius II. in 1462 found it necessary to 
send the most learned men he could find to 
Bosnia to refute their heresies. 34 

But with the death of Tvart-ko III. there 
came a change. His successor, Stephen 
Thomas, was the illegitimate son of one of 
Tvart-ko's rivals, and was raised to the throne 
by the Bogomils, to whose communion he 
belonged. But he was a man of weak and 
vacillating temper, and when the crafty papal 
legate, Thomasini, threatened him with the 
rejection of his claims to the throne unless he 
abjured his faith and became a Roman Catho- 
lic, and promised to reconcile his rivals and to 
give him a consecrated crown if he yielded to 
his demands, the weak king, after a feeble 
resistance, consented, abjured, and was bap- 
tized into the Roman Catholic fold in 1444. 
One of his vassals, Stephen Cosaccia, Duke of 
St. Sava, was a strict Roman Catholic, and re- 
fused allegiance to him unless he thus abjured 
his faith. But no sooner had Stephen Thomas, 
the Bosnian king, commenced or permitted the 
persecution of the Bogomils than the Duke of 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OP THE EAST. 87 

St. Sava (the modern Herzegovina) cut loose 
from the papal party and joined the Bog- 
omils himself. 

In 1446, Stephen Thomas found the sen- 
timents of his people so strongly arrayed 
against him that, like the English King John, 
he was compelled to assemble the magnates of 
his realm, and the Bogomil leaders among 
them, at Coinica> and grant them large priv- 
ileges, and, among others, toleration for the 
Bogomils, but his cowardly and craven nature 
led him to falsify his oath and deliver them 
over to the power of the Inquisition. In 
1450 the Bogomils, wearied and disgusted with 
his treachery and the cruelty of the Inquisition, 
turned for protection to the Turks, and com- 
pelled the king to buy an ignoble peace by the 
payment of a large tribute. In 1457 he ap- 
pealed to the whole Christian world for help 
against the infidel, but he was said to have 
already made with the Turkish sultan that 
solemn alliance of sworn brotherhood known 
to the Sclavonic race as the Pobratimtsvo* 
These constant changes and tergiversations 

*The Pobratimtsvo was a secret rite, performed with 
much ceremony and the mingling of the blood of the two 






88 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

had alienated all his friends from him, and 
his assassination on the field of Bielaj in 1459 
by his step-brother and his own illegitimate 
son, Stephen Tomasevic, caused little sorrow. 

The parricide at once usurped the throne, 
and proved a baser man than his father. He 
claimed to be a Roman Catholic pure and 
simple, and solicited the aid of the pope, Pius 
II. (iEneas Sylvius), on the express ground 
of his desire to commence immediately the 
extirpation of the Bogomil heres} r . In the 
first year of his reign he turned the arms of 
his troops against his unoffending Bogomil 
subjects, and in a few months had slaughtered 
or driven out of his kingdom forty thousand 
of them. In 1463 he again appealed to the 
pope, apparently in great distress at the near 
approach of the Turks. He had occasion 
for this appeal. He had continued his perse- 
cution of the Bogomils, and they, the majority 
of the population of his realm, and especially 
of the cities, were justly incensed against him. 

parties to it, by which they became sworn brothers and 
the recipients of each other's fullest confidence. The 
violation of the vow of brotherhood was considered the 
most horrible of crimes. 



EAELY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 89 

The prospect of another influx of Romish 
heresy-hunters was not a pleasing one to them, 
and, finding that they had nothing to hope for 
from their king, they turned to the Turkish 
sultan and opened negotiations with him. An 
agreement .was made that they would transfer 
their allegiance to him, and he in return guar- 
anteed them their personal liberty, free tolera- 
tion for their religion, freedom from taxation, 
protection of property, and other privileges. 



SECTION XXIII. 

Overtures to the Sultan.— The Surrender of 
Bosnia to Mohammed II. under Stipulations. — 
His base Treachery. — The Destruction and 
Enslavement of the Bogomils of Bosnia, and 
the Duchy of Herzegovina. 

The sultan crossed the Dwina in June, 1463, 
and on the 15th of that month the fortress of 
Bobovac, the strongest in Bosnia, and the 
ancient seat of Bosnian bans and kings, sur- 
rendered to him, its governor being a Bogomil. 
The treacherous and cowardly king fled to 
Jaycze, another strong fortress, but on the ap- 
proach of the Turkish pasha escaped to Clissa, 

8* 



90 EARLY PROTESTANTS OP THE EAST. 

where, after forty days' siege, he surrendered 
on condition of his life being spared, giving up 
his treasures, amounting to a million of ducats. 
In eight days seventy strong cities, nearly all 
of them commanded by Bogomils, opened 
their gates to the sultan's officers. 

But Mohammed II. was a base and infamous- 
ly treacherous prince. He used the wretched 
Stephen Tomasevic to the utmost, gaining 
possession through him of all those towns 
which had not already surrendered, and then 
caused him to be executed, with the most bar- 
barous tortures, on the field of Bielaj, where 
he had assassinated his father. We have no 
tears to shed over this retributive justice upon 
the parricide, but the fate reserved for the 
Bosnians, and particularly for the Bogomils, 
was such as to cause the sultan's name to 
be handed down to after-ages as the synonym 
of infamous perfidy. The most eminent of 
the Bosnian nobles who had not escaped to 
Dalmatia were transported to Asia; thirty 
thousand of the picked youth of Bosnia, sons 
of the best families, were placed as cadets 
among the Janissaries, to be converted to the 
Mohammedan faith and recruit the Moslem 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 91 

armies ; two hundred thousand of the inhab- 
itants, including the young and beautiful, were 
sold as slaves ; the cities and lordly residences 
were plundered, and the whole land given over 
to desolation. 

This blow did not fall at this time on the 
Herzegovina, as its inhabitants stood by their 
duke, Stephen Cosaccia, who, though profligate 
in life, had protected the Bogomils, who form- 
ed by far the larger part of his people. They 
fought bravely for their country and drove 
away the Turks, but were compelled to pay 
tribute. Twenty years later, under the rule of 
Cosaccia's sons, the Turkish armies again in- 
vaded the duchy, and enacted much the same 
scenes as they had done in 1463 in Bosnia. 

The' results of this conquest were disastrous 
for Bosnia, and almost annihilated the Bogo- 
mils. The noble youth who were placed in the 
hands of the Janissaries came back in due sea- 
son Mohammedans in faith, and inherited their 
old estates ; and there is to this day in Bosnia 
a large population (more than four hundred 
thousand) Sclavonians by birth, but Moham- 
medans in religion. This fact greatly compli- 
cated the religious question in the recent war. 



92 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

SECTION XXIV. 

The Bogomils not utterly Extinguished. — Their 
Influence on Society, Literature, and Pro- 
gress in the Middle Ages. — Conclusion. 

As to the Bogomils, there is little reason to 
suppose that any considerable portion of the 
adult population embraced Mohammedanism. 
Of the two hundred thousand slaves, a part — 
perhaps the larger part — may have done so, 
but those who were left wifeless and childless 
could do little to maintain their faith. The 
Roman Catholics are to this day weak there, 
and mainly made up of Italian and Austrian 
immigrants into the country; the main portion 
of the Christian population is Sclavonic and 
attached to the Greek Church, and have come 
in from the adjacent states. 

But Bogomilism did not entirely die out. 
In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth 
centuries we find traces of the Bogomils, 
sometimes as objects of persecution, and both 
Gardiner and Blunt, ecclesiastical cyclopae- 
dists, say that for many years past they have 
had churches in the vicinity of Philippopolis. 
In the insurrection of 1875, among the refu- 



' 



EAKLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 93 

gees from Turkish cruelty and outrage who 
fled to the adjacent Austrian provinces, they 
were found in considerable numbers. Mr. W. 
J. Stillman, our consul at Ragusa, ascertained 
that there were about two thousand of them 
in that city alone, and mostly from Popovo 
and its vicinity, and learned that they were 
still nurnerous in the valley of the Narenta 
and near Crescevo. 

Mr. D. Mackenzie Wallace, in his recent very 
able work on Russia (Am. ed., New York, 1877, 
pp. 293-305), gives a very full account of the 
Molokdni and Stundisti, two Protestant sects 
holding nearly the same views, whom he found 
in Southern and Central Russia, and whose 
tenets he studied with great care and impar- 
tiality, visiting and conferring with their elders 
in regard to their views. 

This narrative of Wallace shows beyond 
question that these South Russian sects are 
the legitimate spiritual descendants of the 
Bogomils. Mr. Wallace, who is, at least in 
sympathy, a Presbyterian of the Kirk of 
Scotland, says that he was attracted to the 
Molokdni (Hepworth Dixon says the name 
means " milk-drinkers ") because he had dis- 



94 EAELY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

covered that their doctrines had at least a 
superficial resemblance to Scotch Presbyteri- 
anism. After some interviews with their 
leading men he found that, though some of 
their doctrines had a strong resemblance to 
Presbyterianism (especially, it would seem, 
what may be considered their Calvinism, 
though they never had heard of Calvin), yet 
there were these differences : Presbyterian- 
ism has an ecclesiastical organization and a 
written creed, and its doctrines have long 
since become clearly defined by means of 
public discussion, polemical literature, and 
general assemblies. " The Molokani" he says, 
"hold that Holy Writ is the only rule of faith 
and conduct, but that it must be taken in 
the spiritual, and not in the literal, sense. 
For their ecclesiastical organization the Mol- 
okdni take as their model the early apostolic 
church as depicted in the New Testament, 
and uncompromisingly reject all later author- 
ities. In accordance with this model, they 
have no hierarchy and no paid clergy, but 
choose from among themselves a presbyter 
(or elder) and two assistants — men well 
known among the brethren for their exem- 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 95 

plary life and their knowledge of the Scrip- 
tures — whose duty it is to watch over the 
religious and moral welfare of the flock. 
On Sundays they hold meetings in private 
houses — they are not allowed to build 
churches — and spend two or three hours in 
psalm-singing, prayer, reading the Scriptures, 
and friendly conversation on religious sub- 
jects." 

Mr. Wallace declares, after the most inti- 
mate intercourse with them, that their know- 
ledge of the Scriptures (although they were 
all peasants) left nothing to be desired. 
Some of them seemed to know the whole 
of the New Testament by heart, and they 
were exceedingly familiar with the Old Tes- 
tament. They are Sclaves, and their Bibles, 
like those of the Bogomils, are in the Scla- 
vonic tongue. " Never have I met," he says, 
"men more honest and courteous in debate, 
more earnest in the search after truth, and 
more careless of dialectical triumphs than 
these simple uneducated peasants." 

There exists among the Molokani a system 
of severe moral supervision. If a member 
has been guilty of drunkenness or any act 



96 EARLY PKOTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

unbecoming a Christian, he is first admon- 
ished by the presbyter (or elder) in private 
or before the congregation; and if this does 
not produce the desired effect, he is excluded 
for a longer or shorter period from the meet- 
ings and from all intercourse with the mem- 
bers. In extreme cases expulsion is resorted 
to. On the other hand, if any one of the 
members happens to be, from no fault of his 
own, in pecuniary difficulties, the others will 
assist him. This system of mutual control 
and mutual assistance has no doubt some- 
thing to do with the fact that the Molokani 
are always distinguished from the surround- 
ing population by their sobriety, uprightness, 
and material prosperity. The testimony from 
all quarters was that they were a quiet, decent, 
sober people. Their doctrines were in general 
those of evangelical Protestant churches, but, 
as they had no creed but the Bible, Mr. Wal- 
lace believed that there was room for consider- 
able diversity of theological views, though he 
acknowledged that he was unable to recognize 
any evidence of that diversity. " One gentle- 
man," he says, "ventured to assure me that 
their doctrine was a modified form of Mani- 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 97 

chseism " (the old charge), " but I did not put 
much confidence in his opinion, for I found 
on questioning him that he knew of Mani- 
chseism nothing but the name. 1 ' The preva- 
lent opinion, which they did not controvert, 
was " that they were the last remnant of a curi- 
ous heretical sect which existed in the early 
Christian church." They are persecuted by 
the Greek Church and the government, 
though not so bitterly now as formerly 
They are said to be loyal and patriotic to- 
ward the emperor, but all the efforts of the 
Greek Patriarchs or the government to convert 
them to the views of the orthodox Greek 
Church have proved utterly unavailing. Mr. 
Wallace estimates their numbers at several 
hundred thousand. 

The Stundisti, whom we know to be Baptists, 
are a sect of more recent origin, but agree gen- 
erally in their doctrines and practices with the 
Molokani. 

There comes to us also, since the conclusion 
of the war between Russia and Turkey, cheer- 
ing evidence that four hundred years of Mos- 
lem sway and the profession of the Moslem 
faith have not utterly driven out from the 

9 Q 



98 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

hearts of these descendants of Bogomil no- 
bles the recollection of the faith of their 
fathers. Several recent writers on Turkey 
and Bosnia have intimated that these Scla- 
vonic Mohammedans were not so strongly 
opposed to Christianity as has been sup- 
posed; and Mr. A. J. Evans, who has been 
travelling in Bosnia again in 1877 and 1878, 
thus writes in his Illyrian Letters: "An active 
leader among the Begs (Sclavonic Moham- 
medan nobles) answered as follows the ques- 
tion whether he would imitate some of his 
associates, who were already receiving bap- 
tism from Bishop Strossmeyer (the Austrian 
Roman Catholic bishop) and his priests : 
' Not yet, but when the time comes and the 
hour of fate strikes, I will do so in another 
style. I w T ill call together my kinsmen, and 
we will return to the faith of our ancestors 
as one man. We would choose to be Prot- 
estants, as are you English; but if need be, 
we will join the Serbian Church. Latin we 
will never be. If we go into a Roman 
church, what do we understand? My fam- 
ily has never forgotten that they were once 
of your faith and were made Moslems by 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 99 

force. ;. In my castle there is a secret vault 
in which there are kept the ancient Christian 
books and vessels that they had before the 
Turks took Bosnia. My father once looked 
into it, then closed it up, and said, 'Let them 
be ; they may serve their turn yet/ How 
many of these secret vaults in Bosnia may 
yet be opened and their Christian books 
brought out?" 

But though thus apparently stamped out in 
the land of its birth and its greatest triumphs, 
under the heel of the fanatic Turk, the doc- 
trine of these martyrs of the faith survived, 
and in more western lands pervaded and in- 
fluenced the religious life, the social condition, 
and the literature of the subsequent centuries. 

It seems to be conclusively demonstrated 
that in his early life the greatest of Italian 
poets, Dante Alighieri, was a member of the 
sect of Patarenes, one of the names by which 
the Bogomils of Italy were designated; and 
though later in life he probably gave in his 
adhesion to the Romish faith, the evidence of 
his early doctrinal beliefs is manifest in the 
"Heaven" and "Hell" of the Divina Com- 
media. That the same views had taken full 



100 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

possession of the mind of John Milton two 
hundred years later, whose Paradise Lost 
might, so far as its theology and demonology 
are concerned, have been written by a Bogomil 
djed, or elder, is equally certain. Nor is this 
surprising. Milton had passed some years in 
Italy and in close association with the Wal- 
denses, the representatives of the Bogomils in 
Italy and Piedmont, and as Cromwell's secre- 
tary of state he nobly interfered in their be- 
half. The later Puritan writers, and notably 
Baxter, Howe, Alleine, and others, give un- 
conscious evidence in their writings of the 
sources from which their doctrines and teach- 
ings were drawn. Even if there were no other 
evidence of the affiliation of the Puritans, both 
of earlier an(F later times, with the Bogomils, 
the doctrine of a personal devil, as now held 
by all the Puritan churches, would be suffi- 
cient to demonstrate it. 

The great movements of the Reformation 
under Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, and Zwin- 
glius, though absorbing considerable numbers 
of the Bogomil or Catharist churches in 
Southern and Central Europe, were in some 
respects for them a retrogression. Their Prot- 



EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 10l 

estantism was purer than that of the Re- 
formers ; they had never bowed the knee to 
Baal, and their mouths had never kissed him ; 
they had never held any allegiance to the 
Romish pope or the Greek patriarch ; they had 
never accepted any of the erroneous doctrines 
of these corrupt churches; and neither the 
psedo-baptism nor the transubstantiation of 
the Church of Rome, nor the consubstantia- 
tion of the Greek and Lutheran churches, 
had any advocates among them. They were 
" Christians " pure and simple, yielding noth- 
ing to conciliate any of those who had a linger- 
ing affection for Romanism. 

It is not wonderful, then, that the Wal- 
denses in Italy and Piedmont should have 
maintained their independent position, nor 
that in England — where the original Reforma- 
tion was deficient in thoroughness, and where 
there were in the country many of the de- 
scendants of the Publicani of the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries* — there should have been 
a revolt from the partial Reformation in the 
shape of that Puritanism which established a 

* In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries these confessors 
to the truth were often known as " Hot Gospellers." 
9* 



102 EARLY PROTESTANTS OF THE EAST. 

purer Protestantism there, and has been the 
corner-stone of free institutions in our own 
country. 35 

The spiritual lineage which we have thus 
briefly and imperfectly traced through the 
ages from the tenth century to our own time is 
one of which every true Protestant may well 
be proud. Though no gorgeous temples, no 
stately cathedrals, have made their worship 
conspicuous and attractive ; though no historian 
has described, with vivid and touching pathos, 
those scenes of martyrdom where scores of 
thousands yielded up their lives rather than 
deny their faith ; though no troubadour has 
given immortality to their paeans of victory, as 
the flames enwrapped them in a glorious wind- 
ing-sheet, — yet their record is on high, and He 
whose approval is worth infinitely more than 
all the applause of men, has inscribed on the 
banner of His love, which surrounds and pro- 
tects the humblest of those who suffered for 
His sake, the legend, " Blessed are the pure 
in heart ; for they shall see God." 



APPENDIX I. 



It has long been a matter of surprise to those who 
have studied the history of Bosnia and Bulgaria that 
the Bogomils, who for so many centuries were nu- 
merous and powerful not only in those states, but in 
Western Europe also, should have left such slight 
traces of a literature behind them. That it was not 
for want of culture or learning was certain, for on 
at least two occasions the popes, and those the most 
accomplished occupants of the papal throne, issued 
their bull requiring that the most learned men of 
the universities of Italy and France should be sent 
to Bulgaria and Bosnia to reason with the elders 
of the Bogomils and confute their heresies. These 
Etonian Catholic scholars did not succeed in con- 
vincing either the elders or their followers. A pas- 
sage from Mr. Evans' Illyrian Letters, which we have 
quoted elsewhere, gives the probable explanation of 
the scarcity of the Bogomilian literature — that it was 
concealed at the time of the Turkish invasion, and 
will probably be brought to light soon. 

Meantime, a careful search has discovered a single 
document (aside from the Bogomil Gospels, a Codex 
of 1404, but preserving the primitive forms of speech) 
which illustrates their doctrines or practices. This 
is a manuscript of wholly uncertain date, partly in 
the Romance and partly in the Provencal language, 
discovered in France in 1851, and now in the Palais 

103 



104 APPENDIX. 

des Arts at Lyons. This was published by Cunitz 
in Jena in 1852.* It is rather a liturgy and book 
of forms than a confession or declaration of faith, 
and, if genuine, pertains to the very latest period of 
their history, and to the French and Italian rather 
than the Bosnian branch of the church. The work 
is not complete. It commences with a short liturgy, 
of which the Lord's Prayer and the Doxology are in 
the Romance language, and the first seventeen verses 
of St. John's Gospel in Latin. The remainder of the 
work is in the Provenyal tongue, and consists, first, 
of an act of confession ; secondly, of an act of recep- 
tion among the number of Credentes, or believers; 
thirdly, of an act of reception among the Perfectly or 
perfect ; fourthly, of some special directions for the 
faithful ; and fifthly, of an act of consolation in case 
of sickness. It is prescribed that the act of confession 
is to be made to God only, and it is concluded with 
the following form of prayer : " O thou holy and good 
Lord, all these things which happen to us in our 
senses and in our thoughts, to thee we do manifest 
them, holy Lord ; and all the multitude of sins we lay 
upon the mercy of God, and upon holy prayer, and 
upon the holy gospel : for many are our sins. O Lord, 
judge and condemn the vices of the flesh. Have no 
mercy on the flesh born of corruption, but have 
mercy on the spirit placed in prison, and administer 
to us days and hours, and genuflections, and fasts, and 
orisons, and preachings, as is the custom of good 

• The extracts from this document given below are from the 
able though somewhat prejudiced article on the Cathari in 
McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, 
and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. ii. pp. 155-157. 



APPENDIX. 105 

Christians, that we may not be judged nor condemned 
in the day of judgment with felons." 

The act of reception into the number of Credentes, 
or believers, seems to have been analogous to "the 
hand of fellowship " in many of the modern churches, 
and, contrary to the conjectures of some of the Ger- 
man critics, seems to have presupposed baptism. It 
was called the delivery of the orison, because a copy 
of the Lord's Prayer was given to the new believer. 
The following is the form as given in this manuscript : 
"If a believer is in abstinence, and the Christians 
are agreed to deliver him the orison, let them wash 
their hands, and the believers present likewise. And 
then one of the bons hommes, the one that comes after 
the elder, is to make three bows to the elder, and then 
to prepare a table, then three more bows, and then he is 
to put a napkin upon the table ; and then three more 
bows, and then he is to put the book upon the nap- 
kin ; and then let him say the Benedicite, partite nobis. 
And then let the believer make his salute and take 
the book from the hand of the elder. And the elder 
must admonish him and preach to him from fitting 
testimonies (or texts). And if the believer's name is 
Peter, he is to say, l Sir Peter, you must understand 
that when you are before the church of God you are 
before the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost/ 
For the Church is called ' assembly/ and where are 
the true Christians, there is the Father and the Son 
and the Holy Ghost." 

The formula of the Consolamentum — which by this 
and perhaps other branches of the Catharists was 
called "the baptism of the Spirit"— was as follows: 
" Jesus Christ says in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 



106 APPENDIX. 

i. 5) that l John surely baptized with water ; but ye 
shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost.' This holy 
baptism of imposition of hands wrought Jesus Christ, 
according as St. Luke reports ; and he said that his 
friends should work it, as reports St. Maifc : i They 
shall lay hands on the sick and they shall receive 
good.' And Ananias wrought this baptism on St. 
Paul when he was converted. And afterward Paul 
and Barnabas wrought it in many places. And St. 
Peter and St. John wrought it on the Samaritans. 
This holy baptism, by which the Holy Spirit is given, 
the church of God has had it from the apostles until 
now, and it has come down from bons hommes to bons 
hommes, and will do so to the end of the world." 

We do not attach much importance to this manu- 
script. It is probably a manual of forms written out 
for the convenience of some of the elders or bons 
hommes of the Toulouse Albigenses or Catharists, or 
perhaps the Vaudois, as late as the fifteenth century, 
or possibly even in the sixteenth ; but the evidence 
is conclusive that these forms were a departure from 
the practices of the Bogomils. They and all the 
earlier Catharists utterly repudiated the practice 
of speaking of the evangelists or apostles, or indeed 
any one else, as saints — as, for instance, St. Paul, St. 
John, etc. ; and this was one of the accusations 
brought against them by their enemies. Another 
point upon which they were strenuous was that all 
the Scripture readings and all the prayers, hymns, 
and responses should be in the common or vulgar 
tongue. In this, on the contrary, the Gospel is in 
Latin and the Psalm is referred to by its Latin title, 
while the Lord's Prayer and the Doxology are in the 



APPENDIX. 107 

Romance tongue, which to them was a foreign lan- 
guage. The ideas of apostolic succession and of the 
repeated reverences to the elder are also wholly foreign 
to the views or practices of the Bosnian or Bulgarian 
Bogomils. These departures from the ancient faith 
and practice make it probable that the congregation 
or congregations for whom this manuscript manual 
was prepared were composed of converts from Roman- 
ism, who had retained some of their old forms and 
doctrines and incorporated them into their new faith. 



APPENDIX II. 

WERE THE PAULICIAN AND BOGOMIL CHURCHES BAP- 
TIST CHURCHES? 

Within the last two years a Baptist newspaper of 
large circulation and conducted with great ability 
has asserted editorially that " there was no evidence 
at present attainable which justified a belief in the 
existence of Baptist churches during the period be- 
tween the fourth and eleventh or twelfth centuries." 
The writer did not deny, although he did not assert, 
that there might have been during that period indi- 
viduals who held to Baptist doctrines. 

But great men are not always wise, and their dicta 
are not always infallible. It happened, at the very 
time that this statement was made, that there was 
evidence attainable that during the period specified 
Baptist churches as pure as any now in existence 
were maintained, and their membership during a part 
of that time was as large as, and perhaps larger than, 



108 APPENDIX. 

that of the Baptist churches throughout the world at 
the present day. 

In our demonstration on this point it may be well 
to define what are and have been in all ages the dis- 
tinguishing characteristics of Baptist churches. 

It will be said, perhaps, by persons who have not 
given the matter much thought, "Oh, everybody 
knows what is the sole characteristic of Baptists: 
they believe in immersion as the only baptism." 
This is true ; but so do the Greek Church, the Mor- 
mons, the Campbellites or Disciples, the Christians, 
the Free- Will Baptists, etc., etc. " Well, they reject 
infant baptism." True; but so do most of those 
named above. 

A critical examination of the history and doctrines 
of the Baptist churches of Europe and America re- 
veals the following negative and positive particulars 
as characteristic of them all. 

1. They take the word of God, as revealed in 
the Bible, as their only sufficient rule of faith and 
practice. 

2. They regard faith in Jesus Christ as God mani- 
fest in the flesh, and as having suffered and died the 
shameful death of the cross, and risen again for their 
justification, and ascended to heaven as their Media- 
tor, as the only sufficient assurance of salvation, and 
that this faith is always connected with repentance 
and regeneration. 

3. They refuse to be bound by any creed or con- 
fession of faith or doctrine which is not clothed in 
the words of the Scriptures. 

4. Their only initiatory rite for membership is the 
immersion of the believer in water on the profession 



APPENDIX. 109 

of his faith. This they do not deem a saving ordi- 
nance, but a simple act of obedience to the command 
of Christ. 

5. They entirely repudiate infant baptism, both as 
unscriptural and injurious to its subjects, inasmuch 
as baptism is only the profession of the act of faith 
on the part of the believer himself, and no one is able 
to promise for an infant that it shall believe at a 
future time. And they regard this baptism of infants 
as tending to hypocrisy and the introduction of un- 
converted persons into the church, and of no signifi- 
cance except where it entitles the infant, as it does 
in some countries, to state privileges. 

6. They regard the Lord's Supper as a memorial, 
not a mystical, service, to be offered only to baptized 
believers. They repudiate utterly the mystical ideas 
of the ordinance entertained by some of the Reformed 
churches, the consubstantiation theory as held by the 
Lutheran, and still more decidedly by the Greek 
Church, and the trans ubstantiation doctrine of the 
Romish Church and its allies. 

7. They abhor the worship of the Virgin Mary in all 
' its forms, and that of the saints, prayers to the saints, 

prayers or masses for the dead, the worship of pic- 
tures, icons, images, crucifixes, and everything of the 
sort, monachism and seclusion, and all attempts to 
acquire merit by superfluous good works. 

8. They believe in the necessity of a pure and 
holy life — not for the attainment of heaven or of any 
earthly or heavenly good, but from gratitude to Him 
who hath redeemed them. 

9. They have always held to freedom of conscience 
and worship. They have never, when they have had 

10 



110 APPENDIX. 

the power, persecuted any for holding views which dif- 
fered from theirs, but have always granted to others 
what they claimed for themselves — the freedom to 
worship God according to the dictates of their con- 
science. 

10. They have always been a plain people — plain 
in dress, plain in their houses of worship, and plain 
in their speech. Their churches have not been deco- 
rated with cross or crucifix, statue or image, lectern, 
altar, reredos, or lighted candles. No "storied win- 
dows dight" have displayed full-length portraits- of 
the Saviour, the apostles, or saints. No chimes of 
bells ring out for them the announcement cf church 
holy-days. Even in the midst of the most gorgeous 
displays of church architecture and decoration they 
have been content with perfect plainness. 

11. They have never acknowledged any hierarchy, 
archbishops, bishops, deans, archdeacons, and priests, 
nor have any of the monastic orders ever gained 
even a momentary foothold in their churches. Their 
pastors, teachers, or elders are chosen from, and licensed 
and ordained by, the churches, and these possess no 
exclusive or ecclesiastical authority ; and though held 
greatly in esteem and love for their works' sake, they 
have no ruling power or right of absolution beyond 
other members of the church, except what is derived 
from their intellectual attainments, their study of 
God's word, and their earnest devotional spirit. 

We think no one familiar with our denomination 
would question, for a moment, the right of a church 
which held these views, and practised in accordance 
with them, to be considered a Baptist church and 
entitled to receive the hand of fellowship at once. 



APPENDIX. Ill 

Will any intelligent man who has carefully read 
this historical sketch point out a single item in which 
the Paulicians and Bogomils failed to come up to the 
standard of Baptist churches of the present day ? 

A great deal has been said of the gross doctrinal 
errors of the Paulicians, and they have been con- 
founded (wilfully in some instances) with the Mani- 
chaeans, Novatians, and other sects whose doctrines 
they vehemently repudiated. The early ecclesiasti- 
cal historians, who have given us such exaggerated 
pictures of their heresies, were themselves mostly 
priests or monks of the Greek Church, bitter parti- 
sans, and champions of a church which enforced uni- 
formity of dogma at the point of the sword. From 
them alone, unfortunately, is nearly all our informa- 
tion in regard to the doctrines of these early Protest- 
ants derived. They had every temptation to misrep- 
resent, and we know that in many instances they did 
so. For a period of ten centuries they persisted, 
against their earnest protests, in calling the Paul- 
icians and Bogomils, Manichseans, and imputing to 
them the dualistic doctrine, which was perhaps held, 
though probably only in a modified form, by some of 
the earlier Paulicians. They attributed to them also 
the phantastic theory of Christ's mission to earth, 
of which there is no trace later than the sixth or 
seventh century. In our narrative we have admitted 
these charges as probable, in the absence of any evi- 
dence to the contrary, but they certainly disappeared 
speedily before the stronger and clearer light of God's 
word. Meantime, these views, if theoretically held 
for a time, were no bar to a saving faith in Christ, 
and did not prevent them from leading lives of such 



112 APPENDIX. 

holiness and purity that even their adversaries were 
compelled to acknowledge their excellence. Nor did 
they prohibit their making the most active exertions 
for the conversion of the world. They were, with all 
their errors, sons of God, without reproach, epistles 
of Christ known and read of all men. 

At a period when the sword was the usual weapon 
for conversion, and the doctrines of the church were 
thrust down the throats of the unconverted " will he, 
nill he," the Paulicians of Armenia were sending out 
their missionaries two and two, unarmed except with 
the word of God, among the savage and pagan Bul- 
garians, to lead them to Christ and to teach them the 
way of salvation ; and they were wonderfully success- 
ful. Many centuries before either the Greek or the 
Roman Church had thought of the possibility of the 
devotion of holy women to the nursing of the sick, 
the care and instruction of the poor and ignorant and 
of little children, and all those works of mercy which 
have made the names of the "Sisters of Charity" 
and of " Mercy" so widely honored, devout women 
of the Paulician and Bogomil churches were giving 
themselves to* these good works ; and not only our 
modern missions, but our modern Sunday-schools and 
hospitals for the sick, find their models and origin 
among these humble people. 

Grant, even, that in their earlier history, with 
but scanty light and with only small portions of the 
word of God accessible to them, they had fallen into 
theoretic errors in regard to the two principles of 
good and evil, and with their vivid Oriental imagi- 
nations had speculated upon the possibility of the 
phantastic theory of our Lord's mission to earth, were 



APPENDIX. 113 

these views any more crude than those of many genu- 
ine converts from heathenism at the present day ? And 
when we set in the balance against these their simple 
faith in Christ, their repudiation of Mariolatry, invo- 
cations to saints, the worship of images and pictures, 
and, above all, their holy living and earnest working 
for the propagation of the truth, why should we turn 
away from them as heretics and unworthy of the 
Christian name? 

The Greek and the Eoman churches, their vio- 
lent and relentless persecutors, who boasted of their 
orthodoxy, were, even at their best, far more heret- 
ical, both in doctrine and in practice, than the Paul- 
icians. Their churches were decked and filled with 
images, sculptures, icons, and paintings of the Virgin 
Mary and the saints, and even with paintings of 
traditional scenes in the lives of saints and em- 
perors which would now bring a blush even upon 
a cheek of brass; the idolatries practised in both 
churches in the worship of the Virgin and the saints 
and emperors, and the adoring of crucifixes and 
relics, were open and gross; while the conduct of 
emperors and empresses, the spiritual heads of the 
church, was so infamous in its criminality that it put 
to shame even the worst of the pagan emperors of 
Borne. There were corruption, simony, theft, profli- 
gacy, and the most horrible licentiousness every- 
where. All these things passed without rebuke, or at 
most with very gentle reproof, from the ecclesiastical 
historians of the times, who reserved the thunders of 
their denunciations for the pure and saintly Paul- 
icians. At a later period the Romish Church emu- 
lated, and even surpassed, the Greek Church in the 
10* H 



114 APPENDIX. 

infamy of its priesthood, the cruelty of its persecu- 
tions of the hapless Bogouiils, and the horrible cor- 
ruption and impurity of its popes, bishops, priests, 
monks, and nuns. 

When the hidden treasures of sacred books, manu- 
scripts, and communion-vessels preserved in the secret 
chambers of castle-vaults in Bosnia and the Herze- 
govina for four hundred years and more by the Mos- 
lem descendants of Bogomil nobles shall be brought 
to light, as they soon will be, we shall learn more 
in detail of the doctrinal views of these Bogomil 
churches, but it is not to be anticipated that we shall 
find anything to their discredit ; for holy living and 
careful, thorough study of God's word ensure sound 
doctrine. "If any man will do his will, he shall 
know of the doctrine." 

Courage and firmness in defending their faith, 
coupled with a patient endurance of persecution for 
righteousness' sake, was a characteristic of the Paul- 
icians, and later of the Bogomils. Evans, a most im- 
partial writer, estimates that between the eighth and 
fifteenth centuries nearly a million of these Protest- 
ants perished by martyrdom in Bulgaria, Bosnia, and 
the Herzegovina. But when, as in the ninth century, 
the Greek Empress Theodora attempted and vowed 
their entire extermination, they showed themselves 
no cowards or cravens in their defence of their 
hearths, their homes, and their faith, but drove back 
their cruel persecutors with such vigor that they made 
them quake in their gilded palaces in Constantinople. 

Then followed an act which we, alone of all the 
Christian denominations, are warranted in claiming 
as distinctively a development of one of our funda- 



APPENDIX. 115 

mental principles — the establishment of the free state 
and city of Tephrice, whose every citizen was at 
liberty to worship God according to the dictates of 
his conscience without let or hindrance. Where did 
these Christian mountaineers get this idea ? All around 
them there was bitter persecution for conscience' 
sake — they themselves had seen one hundred thou- 
sand or more of their brethren slain for their faith 
at the command of the infamous Theodora — yet, 
while flushed with their victory over their perse- 
cutors, they pause and found a state where perse- 
cution for conscientious belief shall be unknown, 
where every creed and every unbeliever shall find 
shelter from persecution. This free state lasted for 
nearly a hundred and fifty years ; and though it was 
too early for permanence, since the nations were not 
capable of grasping so grand an idea, yet it existed 
long enough to show that those whom Christ makes 
free are free indeed. 

And during its existence the freedom of opinion 
maintained there was not apathy or indifference. 
Far from it. The free city of Tephrice was the 
centre and seat of a missionary enterprise which has 
had no parallel since the time of the apostles. The 
missionary elders went forth two and two, sustained 
by their brethren at home, throughout Bulgaria, Bos- 
nia, and Serbia, preaching the word, and the pagarl 
Bulgarians and Bosniacs were converted in such 
numbers that their enemies of the Greek Church 
began to add to the other opprobrious names which 
they gave to the Paulicians that of Bulgars, which 
after a time was corrupted into " Bougres," by which 
term, among others, they were known for centuries. 



116 APPENDIX. 

At length so many of these missionaries migrated 
into Bulgaria that Tephrice became nearly depopu- 
lated, and fell into the hands of the Saracens. At a 
later period, when the Bogomils were, as was the case 
several times, the masters of Bosnia for forty, sixty, 
or, in one instance, a hundred years, they never re- 
taliated upon their persecutors the wrongs which they 
had endured, but always advocated the largest liberty 
of opinion. 

That the Bogomils of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Ser- 
bia in the eleventh and following centuries had purged 
themselves from those erroneous doctrines which 
were taught by the earlier Paulicians, and were as 
clear in their doctrinal views as the Baptist churches 
here to-day, is abundantly evident from the reluctant 
testimony of their adversaries. They do not quite 
abandon their old nickname of Manichseans in speak- 
ing of them, but oftener they call them Patarenes, Bou- 
gres, Ketzers, Publicani, and sometimes Arians, which 
is widest of the mark of all, for their belief in the 
divinity of Christ and his equality with the Father 
was as sound as that of the Athanasian Creed. 

If their affiliation with all the purest Reformers be- 
fore the Reformation were not so thoroughly demon- 
strated as it is, we might have anticipated it from 
their known missionary spirit ; hut there is no fact in 
history better substantiated than that the Bogomil 
churches in Bosnia were the mother-churches from 
which originated, through the labors of their faithful 
missionaries, the congregations of Waldenses, Vau- 
dois, Poor Men of Lyons, Catharists, Ketzers, Publi- 
cani, Bohemians, and Hussites; and it is equally cer- 
tain that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centu- 



APPENDIX. 117 

ries, and probably both earlier and later, there was 
an annual intercourse kept up between these churches 
and the mother- churches in Bosnia. Eventually there 
were probably some diversities of doctrine, which 
crept in among the Western churches ; the manu- 
script found at Lyons in 1851, and which contains a 
form of worship certainly not earlier than the latter 
part of the fifteenth century — which we give in part 
elsewhere — indicates considerable departures from the 
earlier faith. What these were it is difficult to say. 
They certainly did not include infant baptism, which 
was repudiated by most of the Christian churches of 
the Continent that had never been in fellowship with 
Eome. They may have admitted, in some cases, 
affusion or sprinkling in the place of immersion in 
baptism, but this is uncertain, and in the more 
southern churches improbable. 

But there is one fact which should be kept in mind : 
the Bogomils, and, earlier, the Paulicians, as well as 
the churches which affiliated with them in Western 
Europe, refused to be called reformers, or even Prot- 
.estants, if by that term there should be any impli- 
cation that they were originally seceders from either 
the Soman or the Greek churches. They said uni- 
formly and boldly, " We have never had any connection 
with those corrupt churches ; and though we protest 
against their false doctrines, we have no belief that 
they can ever be reformed into churches of Christ." 
It was this bold and consistent opposition to these 
great churches which so inflamed their wrath and 
made them such bitter persecutors of the Bogomil 
churches. As a consequence of this, as we have 
noticed in the history, none of those churches which 



118 APPENDIX. 

had affiliated with the Bogomils of Bosnia were 
much enlarged by the Eeformation, and most of 
them maintained a separate existence after that 
event. 

This is just the position that the Baptist churches, 
and they only, have always occupied. They did not 
come out from Eome, for they never belonged to it. 
They sympathize, indeed, with what is good in the 
work of the Eeformation, and with the churches 
which cannot go farther back than Luther or Calvin 
or Zwinglius for their origin ; yet all of those churches 
retain, in their ordinances, their infant membership, 
and their hierarchy, some traces of their former ad- 
herence to the Church of Eome. The white robe of 
their profession has still some stains upon it. The 
Baptist churches, on the other hand, trace their 
spiritual lineage back in an unbroken line through 
myriads of white-robed martyrs who never were de- 
filed by contact with Eome to the days of the 
apostles, and reckon as among their earliest elders and 
preachers the names of Paul and Peter and John, of 
Stephen and Philip and Barnabas, of Silas and 
Timothy and Titus ; and the only priest they know is 
the Great High Priest who is passed into the hea- 
vens, the Shepherd and Bishop of souls. 

In this noble position we stand, as a denomination, 
alone, though the early Puritans of England might 
have shared it with us had they not given up their 
birthright by adopting the twin errors of affusion 
and infant baptism from Eome. 



NOTES. 



1 (§ II.). The denial of their practice of water -baptism, 
etc. — Harmenopoulos, a Byzantine monk of the tenth cen- 
tury, more candid than most of his fellows, says, as 
quoted by Mr. Evans, " that the Bogomils practised the 
rite (and if they did they must have received it from the 
Paulicians)," but did not attribute to it any perfecting 
(reAetovi/) virtue. This last expression is significant in 
this connection as showing that this rite was administered 
to all the believers (Credentes), in distinction from the spirit- 
ual baptism, or consolamentum (which we have elsewhere 
described), which was only administered to those who were 
admitted to the ranks of the Perfecti, or perfect ones, upon 
whom this spiritual baptism was supposed to exert a per- 
fecting virtue. It is, we believe, generally admitted that 
the early Armenian Church, of which the Paulicians were 
an offshoot, did not practise trine immersion, like the Greek 
Church, though they immersed their converts once and ap- 
plied the unction three times. At a later period and at the 
present day they immerse the subject, generally an infant, 
once in the font, and then pour water from the hand upon 
its head three times, adding also the anointing and other 
ceremonies. I have not been able to find a copy of Har- 
menopoulos' history in any of our libraries. 

See further, on this point, the testimony of Alanus de 
Insulis, about A. D. 1200, quoted in Note 3, $ viii. 

2 (§ II.). Jirecek, Geschichte der Bulgaren, pp. 180, 181 ; 
Presbyter Cosmas (a Greek priest of the tenth century), in 
his Slovo na Eretiki, cited by Hilferding; Serbenund Bul- 
garen (German translation, vol. i. p. 120). 

3 (§ II.). Hilferding, in his work named above, quotes 
from the presbyter Cosmas a description of two sects of 
Paulicians, of which the first held to doctrines more dis- 
tinctly dualistic than the second. The latter, whose doc- 
trines we ^iave summarized in this section, was, he acknow- 
ledges, much the most numerous. Hilferding identifies the 

119 



120 NOTES. 

first with a Bulgarian sect known as " The Church of Dre- 
govisce," which eventually became extinct, and the second 
with " The Church of Bulgaria," which were the spiritual 
ancestors of the Albigenses. He says further that the 
Italian inquisitor and renegade Beinero Sacconi, of the 
thirteenth century, mentions both in his list of the thirteen 
churches or nations of the Cathari. Hilferding, Serben 
und Bulgaren (German translation, vol. i. pp. 122-128 
and ff.). 

4 (§ III.). For this act of Constantine V. see Gibbon's 
Borne (Bonn's ed., vol. vi. p. 245). 

5 (£ IV.). See Gibbon's Rome (Bohn's ed., vol. vi. p. 
242). Gibbon quotes in this and the following note from 
Petrus Siculus (pp. 579-764) and Cedrenus (pp. 541-545). 

6 (£ IV.). Gibbon's Rome (Bohn's ed.,vol. vi. p. 243); Ar- 
thur J. Evans, Historical View of Bosnia (p. 30) ; Petrus Sic- 
ulus, Historia Manichceorum. Petrus Siculus was for nine 
months in A. D. 870 a^egate from the Byzantine emperor at 
Tephrice, negotiating for exchange of prisoners, and wrote 
his History there, which was addressed to the new arch- 
bishop of the Bulgarians. See the account of Petrus Sicu- 
lus and this history in the 3/axima Bibliotheca Patrum 
(vol. xvi.). Petrus Siculus, Historia Manichworum (pp. 
754-764, edition of the Jesuit Baderus, Ingoldstadt, 1604, in 
4to). 

7 ($ IV.). Tephrice (Gr. Te<£pix??), now Divrigni, is in Asia 
Minor, about one hundred and forty miles south-west of 
Trebizond and one hundred and seventy south by west of 
Erzeroum. It is situated on a plain 3116 feet above the sea. 
Its present inhabitants are wild and ferocious Koords. 

8 (§ V.). This derivation of the word Bogomil, or Bogo- 
mile, was first given by Epiphanius, a Byzantine writer, 
quoted in Sam. Andrese's Disqitisitio de Bogomilis. 

9 (# V.). Becent Sclavonic writers, quoted by A. J. Evans 
in Historical Review of Bosnia (p. 31, note). 

10 (£ VII.). The authorities for this picture of the Bogomil 
worship and manners are mostly drawn from Hilferding's 
German translation of his Serben und Bulgaren (vol. i. pp. 
118 and t'i\). He cites, in regard to these subjects, The /Sy- 
nodic of the Czar Boris, written in the year 1210; the 
Armenian Chronicle of Acogh'ig; the Slovo na Eretiki of 
the presbyter Cosmas, about 990 ; the Panoplia of Euthy- 
mius Zygabenus, the scribe or secretary of the emperor Alex- 



NOTES. 121 



ius Comnenus, about 1097 (Gieseler's edition, Gottingen, 
1852), and Harinenopoulos, the Greek monk already re- 
ferred to, of the tenth century. 

11 (£ VIII.). Racki, cited by Jirecek, Geschichte der Bulgaren 
(pp. 177 and if.); other SouthSeiavonic and Byzantine writers, 
also cited by Jirecek,* the Panoplia of Euthyraius Zygabe- 
nus, translated by Gieseler (Gottingen, 1852), Hilferding ; Ne- 
ander, Church History (Marsh's ed., vol. iv. pp. 552 and ft*.) ; 
Gieseler, De Bogomilis Commentatio, etc., etc. Sir Henry 
Spelman (Concilice, vol. ii. p. 59) and Nubrigiensis (book 
ii. c. 13), both cited by Jeremy Collier in his Ecclesi- 
astical History of Great Britain (Lathbury's ed., London, 
1852, vol. ii. pp. 247, 248), both say of the Publicans, whose 
origin they trace through the Waldenses and Albigenses to 
Croatia and Dalmatia, that they refused to be called by any 
other name than Christians, and that their views were the 
same with those attributed to the Bogomils. 

12 ($ VIII.). These two classes, the Perfecti and Credentes, 
are mentioned by all writers on the Bogomils and the sects 
with which they were affiliated ; and it was one of the 
many evidences of their substantial identity with the Albi- 
genses, Patarenes, Vaudois, Catharists, Ketzers, Publicans, 
Waldenses, etc., etc., that the same classes, under equiva- 
lent names, existed in all these sects of alleged heretics. 
Both Jirecek and Hilferding give minute accounts of this 
division of the Bogomils and of the initiatory rites of the 
Perfecti, quoting largely from the Sclavonic and Byzantine 
writers already referred to, and their statements are corrob- 
orated by Regnier or Reinero, Petrus Monachus, a Cistercian 
monk who wrote a history of the crusade against the Albi- 
genses, by Alanus de Insulis, whose treatise against the 
heretics, written about A. D. 1200, was published by Masson at 
Lyons, in 1612, and by Beausobre, Histoire du Manichceisme 
(vol. ii. pp. 762-877). In Provence the Perfecti were called 
Bons Hommes, and in Bosnia and Bulgaria, in the Scla- 
vonic, Krstjani dobri Bosniani, or sometimes in both coun- 
tries Svrsiteli, or the elect. 

Regnier, or Reinero, about A. D. 1250, is the best possible 
authority in regard to the number of the Perfecti, for he 
had been one of the Credentes, or believers, among the Pa- 
tarenes, as the Bogomils of Italy were called, and there 
is also a tradition that he was a Dalmatian by birth. 

13 (§ VIII., foot-note). To the authorities here named 
for the proposition that the Credentes, or believers, were 
baptized must be added Alanus de Insulis, a French writer 

11 



122 NOTES,, 

of about A. D. 1200, whose treatise against heretics was pub- 
lished by Masson of Lyons in 1612. He is cited by Hallam, 
Middle Ages (vol. iii. pp. 359, 360, note. Am. edition, 1864). 
Alanus, speaking of the Albigenses, who are fully identified 
with the Bogcrmils, says, " They rejected infant baptism, 
but were divided as to the reason, some saying that infants 
could not sin and did not need baptism ; others that they 
could not be saved without faith, and consequently that it 
was useless. They held sin after baptism to be irremissible. 
It does not appear that they rejected either of the sacraments. 
They laid great stress upon the imposition of hands, which 
seems to have been their distinctive rite." Jeremy Collier, 
in his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (vol. ii. pp. 338, 
339, ed. of 1852), speaking of the Albigenses of Toulouse, 
A. D. 1178, gives first the account of their doctrines found 
in a letter of the Earl of Toulouse to the Cistercian chapter, 
as recorded by Gervase of Canterbury. This letter is full 
of passion and violence. He declares that " the sacraments 
of baptism and the holy eucharist were renounced and de- 
tested by them ; ... in short, all the sacraments of the 
church are vilified and disused." " Roger de Hoveden," a 
somewhat more dispassionate writer, gives, Collier says, a 
somewhat different account. His statement is "that they 
refused to own infant baptism, declared against swearing 
upon any account, expressed themselves with a great deal 
of satire and invective against the hierarchy, . . . and re- 
fused to be concluded by any other authority excepting 
that of the New Testament." 

Nothing is said by Hoveden of their rejection of the 
sacraments of baptism and the eucharist, which would cer- 
tainly have been mentioned by so careful a writer as Hove- 
den if it had existed. Indeed, his strongest objection to 
them was their wilful persistence in refusing to take an 
oath. 

The noticeable point in all this testimony is that infants 
should not be baptized because they had not faith; that a 
personal profession of faith was a necessary prerequisite for 
baptism ; that the spiritual baptism symbolized by the con- 
solamentum was in their view the baptism of the Holy 
Ghost, which was only conferred on those who were already 
believers, but who wished to become perfect. 

The fact that all the Oriental churches practised immersion 
only, and that this is still their only mode of baptism, is so 
well established by the testimony of all ecclesiastical writers 
that it seems hardly to need any additional verification; 
yet perhaps the following references may not be out of 



NOTES. 123 

place : Neander, Apostelgeschichte (History of Apostolic 
Church), (i. p. 276) ; Knapp, Vorlesungen uber die Christ- 
liche Glaubenslehre (ii. p. 453) ; Hofling, I. c. (i. pp. 46 and 
ff.); Schaff, History of Apostolic Church (pp. 568-570); 
Conybeare and Howson, Life of St. Paul (i. p. 471) ; G. A. 
Jacob, D. D., Ecclesiastical Polity of New Testament (Am. 
ed. pp. 258-279); F. A. Farrar, Life of Christ (vol. i. 
pp. 114 and ff.); A. Geikie, Life and Words of Christ (vol. 
i. p. 577, note) ; Dean Stanley, Eastern Church (Eng. ed., 
p. 34); Philip Smith, Student's Ecclesiastical History (p. 
172). 

14 (% IX.). This testimony is scattered through all the centu- 
ries from the sixth to the fifteenth, and applies alike to the 
Paulicians, Bogomils, Albigenses, Patarenes, Catharists, 
and Waldenses. Even Petrus Siculus acknowledges their 
holy and pure life, and admits that, in 660, Simeon, a 
Greek priest sent to put their leader to death, was con- 
verted by their heroic and unselfish devotion to their 
faith, and became, like the apostle Paul, a missionary and 
martyr to their doctrines. The same writer acknowledges 
that they were not believers in the doctrines of Manes, and 
hence were wrongly called Manichseans ; and after recapitu- 
lating six heresies which they held — of which only a modi- 
fied dualism, and a belief that Christ brought his body from 
heaven would now be reckoned heresies — he confesses that 
they were endowed with sincere and zealous piety, and 
were studious of the Scriptures. Gibbon (certainly an 
impartial witness) says of the Paulicians, after a very 
thorough and protracted study of the early writers on the 
subject, "A confession of simple worship and blameless 
manners is extorted from their enemies ; and so high was 
their standard of perfection that the increasing congre- 
gations were divided into two classes of disciples — of those 
who practised and of those who aspired. " (Gibbon's Rome, 
Bonn's ed., vol. vi. p. 249.) The presbyter Cosmas and the 
secretary of the emperor Alexius Comnenus, in the works 
already quoted, and in the words cited elsewhere in this 
work, are compelled, though with evident disgust, to testify 
to the purity, not only of their lives, but of their conver- 
sation. 

La Nobla Leyczon, a Provencal poem of Waldensian 
origin, and of a date not later than A. D. 1200, contains the 
following stanza, which illustrates the purity of the lives 
of the Waldenses as well as the malignant hostility of their 
enemies. 



124 NOTES. 

11 Que sel se troba alcun bon que vollia araar Dio e temer Jeshu Xrist, 
Que non vollia maudire, ni jura, ni mentir, 
Ni avoutrar, ni aucire, ni penre de l'autruy, 
Ni venjar se de li sio ennenrie 
Illi dison quel es Vaudes e degne de murir." 

A free translation of these lines would be : 
" Whoso finds any good man who wishes to love God and 
bear witness for Jesus Christ, who will not curse nor swear 
nor lie, who will not be an adulterer nor steal nor do wrong 
to another, nor avenge himself upon his enemy, people will 
tell him that that man is one of the Vaudois, and ought to 
be put to death." — Hallam's Middle Ages (vol. iii. p. 363, 
note) ; Am. ed., do. ; Literature of Europe (vol. i. p. 50, 
note, Am. ed.). 

15 ($ XI.). The Alexiadus of the Princess Anna Comnena 
is a diffuse, voluminous, and gossipf work after the fashion 
of the writers of those days. It abounds in the most ful- 
some praises of her father, herself, and all connected with 
the imperial household. As her father's reign continued 
for thirty-seven years, she expands her wearisome details 
over many books, that relating to the entrapping and 
martyrdom of Basil being the fifteenth. The Alexiad was 
translated into French and largely annotated by the learned 
Ducange, and his edition is the only one now generally 
accessible. This account of Basil is from liber xv. 486- 
494 of Ducange's edition of the Alexiad. Gibbon, Decline 
and Fall (vol. vi. p. 247, and note, Bonn's ed.), afiirms that 
Basil was the only victim burned at the stake at this time, 
and there is some reason to think that the statement is cor- 
rect; but Alexius within a short time thereafter persecuted 
the Bogomils to the death, and the Princess Anna boasts 
that he entirely exterminated them. 

16 (§ XI.). This colony of Armenian Paulicians is said by , 
Zonaras (vol. ii. liber 17, p. 209), cited by Gibbon, to have 
been more numerous and powerful than any that had gone 
before from the Chalybian hills to the valleys of Mount 
H senilis. The date of their migration is said to have been 
A. D. 970. Anna Comnena also mentions this colony in the 
Alexiad (liber xiv. p. 450 etff.). 

These Armenian Paulicians were probably dualists, and 
possibly held to the phantastic theory of the advent of 
Christ — viz., that he was clothed with an impassive celestial 
body and that his death and resurrection were only appar- 
ent, and not real. We say "possibly," because, though 
there were undoubtedly sects more or less intimately con- 



NOTES. 125 



nected with the Gnostics and Manichseans in Armenia and 
Asia Minor who held these views, yet the evidence that the 
Paulicians did entertain them is solely furnished by their 
bitter enemies, who we know for the next five or six centu- 
ries did not hesitate to propagate the most unblushing false- 
hoods concerning them. 

The statement that they were Manichseans was indus- 
triously propagated for more than six centuries, and was 
fastened upon them in the fifteenth century by King Stephen 
Thomas of Bosnia, notwithstanding their earnest and indig- 
nant protests through all their history, and even the fair 
and impartial Hal] am, whose investigations in regard to 
these sects were more thorough and exhaustive than those 
of any other writer except Mr. Evans, is so far deceived by 
this constant reiteration that he admits its probability in 
regard to all of them except the Waldenses, and perhaps a 
part of the Catharists. With the proofs now at our com- 
mand, however, of the identity of the Catharists and the 
Waldenses with the Bogomils, this admission proves fatal 
to the Manichasan doctrines of the whole. It is probable, 
nevertheless, that these Armenian Paulicians formed "The 
Church of ' Dregovisce" which Hilferding says, in chapter 
i. part i. of his Serben unci Bulgaren, was much more 
dualistic and held to many errors which were not held by 
the Christian church of Bulgaria. The Albigenses of the 
earlier dates were the spiritual children of this church of 
Dregovisce. 

Both Jirecek and Evans notice also one source of the 
dualistic doctrines of these early Bulgarian believers. The 
Armenian Paulicians were planted in Epirus and Thrace, 
while the Bulgarians — Bulgares — a mixed race, half Tartar 
and half Aryan, were yet pagans, and the Paulicians found 
them already imbued with dualistic ideas: they divided 
their worship between the Black God, the spirit of evil, 
and the White God, or spirit of good. Jirecek's words are : 
"Es war fur Bogomil keine schwere aufgabe, das unlangst 
erst dem Heidenthiime entriickte volk fur eine Glaubens- 
lehre zu gewinnen, welche, gleich dem alten slawischen My- 
thus von den Bosi und Besi, lehrt dass es zvveierlei hohere We- 
sen gebe, namlich einen guten und einen losen Gott." (Ge- 
schichte der Bulgaren, p. 1 75. See also Evans' Historical Re- 
view of Bosnia, pp. 41, 42.) Every one who is familiar with 
the operations of foreign missions among the heathen must 
have noticed how ready the native converts are to accommo- 
date anything in their new views to their old beliefs and 
prejudices. A most notable instance of this is the well- 

11* 



126 NOTES. 

known fact that, in all Buddhist countries, Roman Catholic 
missionaries have met with great success, from the similarity 
of their doctrines of merit, of the priesthood, of monastic 
orders, aud of instruction, to those already held by the 
Buddhists. 

But that a closer study of the Scriptures, when they were 
translated into the Sclavonic, Italian, Provencal, German, 
and English tongues, had led them to abandon the dualistic 
doctrines or hold them in a mitigated and not unscriptural 
form is evident even from the testimony of their adversaries. 
Thus Petrus (or Robertus) Monachus, a Cistercian monk, 
who wrote an account of the crusades against the Albi- 
genses in the thirteenth century (cited in Ballam's Middle 
Ages, Am. ed., vol. iii. pp. 359, 360), says that " many of 
them" (observe, not all) " assert two principles or creative 
beings — a good one for things invisible, an evil one for 
things visible ; the former author of the New Testament, 
the latter of the Old ; and they wholly repudiate, except as 
possessing a certain authority, all those passages of the Old 
Testament which are quoted in the New, and even these 
they only deem worthy to be received on account of their 
reverence for the New Testament." This assertion that 
they rejected the entire Old Testament because they be- 
lieved it the work of the evil spirit is reiterated by all the 
Greek and the Roman Catholic writers from Petrus Siculus 
in the ninth century, Monachus and Alanus in the thirteenth, 
down to Matthew Paris, Roger de Hoveden, Ralph of 
Coggeshale, and Gervase of Canterbury; yet we have the 
most conclusive evidence that it was not true. Euthymius 
Zygabenus, the secretary of the emperor Alexius Comnenus 
when Basil was examined by the emperor, and a most bitter 
enemy of the Bogomils, states in his Panoplia (as cited by 
Evans, Historical Review, etc., p. 36) that the Bogomils ac- 
cepted seven holy books, which he enumerates as follows : 
1. The Psalms; 2. The Sixteen Prophets: 3, 4, 5, and 6. 
The Gospels; 7. The Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and 
the Apocalypse. Some writers have charged them with re- 
jecting the Epistles of Peter and the Apocalypse, but there 
is no evidence of this. The Bogomil New Testament was 
word for word that of the early Sclavic apostle Methodius. 
Of this Jirecek furnishes on p. 177 the most conclusive 
proofs. If, then, this statement of their enemies, like so 
many others, is proved to be false, what assurance is there 
that their alleged dualistic doctrines were anything more 
than an old falsehood revamped for the occasion ? 

17 (g XII.). This summary of the worship and mode of 



NOTES. 127 

life of the Bogomils is substantiated in every point, though 
with evident reluctance, by the presbyter Cosmas in his 
JSlovo na Hretiki, Euthymius Zygabenus in his Panoplia, 
Anna Comnena in lib. xv. of the Alexiad, and Sclavonic 
authorities collected by Jirecek and Hilferding. 

18 (g XIII.). Jirecek, Geschichte der Bulgaren, p. 180. 

19 (# XIII.). The Bosnian chief djed, or elder, seems to 
have been at this time (about A. D. 1220) the presiding offi- 
cer of the affiliated sects or denominations, somewhat like 
the former presidents of our triennial conventions. He 
was primus inter pares, but possessed no judicial or ecclesi- 
astical authority. (See Jirecek, Geschichte der Bulgaren, p. 
180). 

20 (§ XIV.). This is Hilferding's statement. 

21 (g XIV.). Schimek, Politihe Geschichte des Konigreichs 
Bosnien und Roma (p. 36), cited by Evans, Hist. Rev. of 
Bosnia (p. 43). 

22 (f XV.). Schimek, Pol. Geschichte des Kbnigreiche Bos- 
nien, etc. (p. 48). 

23 (§ XV., foot-note). Schimek, as above; Mackenzie and 
Irwin's Serbia. 

24 (# XV.). Farlati, " Episcopi Bosnenses " (in his Ulyri- 
cum Sacrum, vol. iv. p. 45), cited by Evans, Hist. Rev. of 
Bosnia (p. 44). 

25 (? XV.). Evans, Hist. Rev. of Bosnia (p. 44). 

26 (§ XVI.). Regnier or Reinero, about A. D. 1250, is a 
well-known authority. Maitland, Facts and Documents on 
the History of the Albigenses and Waldenses (London, 1832) 
criticizes his statements. He is quoted by Mosheim, Beau- 
sobre, Gibbon, and Jirecek, but I have not been able to 
find in our libraries a copy of his work, and so cannot 
verify in person the above statement, though all the author- 
ities I have cited agree in regard to it. 

27 (§ XVI.). The substantial identity of these sects, which 
under so many different names were spread over all West- 
ern Europe, and their origin from the Protestants of Bul- 
garia and Bosnia, was strongly suspected by others than 
Regnier even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Per- 
haps the earliest of the writers who gives positive testimony 
on this point is William Little of Newbury (A. D. 1136- 
1220), more generally known as Neubrigiensis or Nubrigien- 
sis, from his residence. He was the author of a history of 



128 NOTES. 



England from the Norman conquest to A. D. 1197, in five 
books, and he was an eye-witness of much that he describes. 
His history is found in full in Hearne's collection of early 
English histories. 

In book ii. chap. 13 of his history he speaks of the 
coming of foreign heretics called Publicans into England 
in 1160. He says : " The heresy first appeared in Gascoigne, 
though from what person is uncertain. From thence the 
erroneous doctrine spread through a great many provinces 
of France, Spain, Italy, and Germany ; they gained ground 
by the remissness of the church discipline. They were/' 
he says, "a company of ignorant rustics, and, though their 
understandings were very gross and unimproved, yet their 
obstinacy and self-opinion was such that the convincing 
them by argument and retrieving them from their mistake 
was well-nigh an impossibility. " Their leader was one 
Gerhard, who, he admits, had some little learning, but the 
rest, about thirty in number, were altogether unlettered. 
Their language was High Dutch. Their doctrines, as Ger- 
hard stated them, were identical with those of the Waldenses 
and .Ketzers. They were orthodox enough, Neubrigiensis 
says, concerning the Trinity and the incarnation (no dual- 
ism there), but then, as to many other material points, they 
were dangerously mistaken; for they rejected infant bap- 
tism and the holy eucharist — i, <?., the doctrine of the real 
presence — declared against marriage (qu. t as one of the 
sacraments?) and catholic communion. They were more 
familiar with the Scriptures than the bishops of the Council 
which examined and persecuted them; and, finding them- 
selves worsted in argument, the bishops lost their temper, 
admonished them to repent and return to the communion 
of the church, and on their declining to do so turned them 
over to the secular arm, with the result stated in the text. 
A later historian, Sir Henry Spelman (1561-1641), in re- 
lating this incident, declares his belief that they were Wal- 
denses, although this was the very year that Peter Waldo 
is said to have formed his congregation at Lyons. Sir 
Henry Hallam — whose careful researches in regard to the 
whole subject we have already noticed, and who, while ad- 
mitting the Bulgarian or Bosnian origin of all the other 
sects, the Albigenses, Catharists, Ketzers, Publicans, etc., 
pleads earnestly for a different paternity for the Waldenses, 
mainly on the ground that he does not think they were 
Manichseans, as he believes the others to have been — has 
yet, with his accustomed fairness, brought forward some 
very important proofs that they existed as a sect long 



NOTES. 129 

before Waldo's time, and that some of their original leaders 
came from Hungary or countries adjacent to Hungary. 

The Waldensian poem La Nobla Leyczon, already re- 
ferred to in Note 1 {\ IX.), is unquestionably genuine, and 
the highest authorities agree could not have been written 
later than the close of the twelfth century, some thirty or 
thirty-five years after Peter Waldo commenced his labors at 
Lyons. This time is altogether too short for the develop- 
ment of the condition of persecution which then existed if 
the Waldenses had originated from Waldo's labors. But a 
still stronger argument for their existence before the time 
of Waldo and for their Eastern origin is furnished by Sir 
Henry Hallam {Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 361, note; American 
edition) : " I have found, however, a passage in a late work 
which remarkably illustrates the antiquity of Alpine Prot- 
estantism, if we may depend on the date it assigns to the 
quotation." Mr. Planta's History of Switzerland (p. 93, 
4to ed.) contains the following note: "A curious passage 
singularly descriptive of the character of the Swiss has 
lately been discovered in a manuscript chronicle of the 
abbey of Corvey, which appears to have been written about 
the beginning of the twelfth century. ' Religionem nos- 
tram, et omnium LatinseecelesiseChristianorum fidem, laici 
ex Suavia, Suicia, et Bavaria humiliare voluerunt: homi- 
nes seducti ab antiqua progenie simplicium hominum, qui 
Alpes et viciniam habitant, et semper amant antiqua. In 
Suaviam, Bavarian), et Italian) borealem ssepe intrant illo- 
rum (ex Suicia) mercatores, qui biblia ediscunt memoriter, 
et ritus ecclesise aversantur, quos credunt esse novos. 
Nolunt imagines venerari, reliquias sanctorum aversantur, 
olera comedunt, raro masticantes carnem, alii nunquam. 
Appelamus eos idcirco Manichaeos. Horum quidam ab 
Hungari& ad eos convenerunt,' etc." 

It is a pity that Mr. Planta should have broken off the 
quotation, as its continuation might have given us further 
information concerning these Bosnian Perfecti, for such 
they evidently were, not worshipping images or pictures, 
turning away from the relics of the saints and from the so- 
called sacraments of the Romish Church, thoroughly fa- 
miliar with the Scriptures, subsisting on vegetables, rarely or 
never eating meat, and, while passing as merchants or 
hawkers of goods, really exercising their vocation as mis- 
sionaries and preachers of the word. They too were called 
Manichseans, that old term of reproach which for so many 
centuries had been forced upon them by their enemies. 
Their disciples, Hallam admits, were the Waldenses of the 



130 NOTES. 

Alpine valleys. If the teachers were regarded as Man- 
ichseans, their disciples could hardly he called by any other 
name ; and, though Robert Monachus, Alanus de Tnsulis, 
and William du Puy, monkish historians of the early part 
of the thirteenth century, as quoted by Sir Henry Hallam, 
speak of the Waldenses as heretics, but less perverse than 
those* they had previously described, their testimony in re- 
gard to their actual doctrines is hardly to be considered of 
any great value. 

The fact in the case seems to have been that Peter Waldo, 
if not himself one of the Bosnian Perfecti and "merca- 
tores" (he is said to have been a merchant or trader), was 
a convert to the Bogomil doctrines, and, entering the ranks 
of the Perfecti — or, as they were called in France at a later 
date, " Pons Hommes " — became a magister or senior (terms 
answering to the strojnik, apostle, or djed, elder, of the 
Bosnians) to the church already existing in Lyons, and by 
his missionary zeal aided powerfully in propagating the 
Protestant doctrines in France and Germany. Hallam says 
that a translation of the Bible was made by Waldo's direc- 
tion, and this was probably the first made into the Pro- 
vencal tongue, those previously used having probably been 
either the Vulgate and Latin of Jerome or the Sclavonic 
version of Methodius. 

Hallam also says that the missionary labors of the Wal- 
denses were directed toward Bohemia. This seems to be 
only so far true as that there was a very free intercom- 
munication among all the branches of these Protestant 
churches by means of the " mercatores," who in all their 
histories have so important a place. Regnier mentions the 
Church of Bohemia as one of the thirteen provinces of the 
Catharist affiliated churches. 

Jirecek {GeschicJite der Pulgaren, p. 214) refers to a di- 
ploma of Innocent IV. in A. D. 1244 which demonstrates 
that there was a frequent intercourse between the Wal- 
denses and their co-religionists in Bosnia. He also cites 
Palaeky and Brandl to show the intimacy of the Bosnian 
and Moravian churches. 

Jirecek speaks of the constant tendency of the Booromils 
toward a purer orthodoxy, and states that one of the Italian 
Bogomil elders — Giovanni di Lugio — taught of the real 
humanity of Christ and accepted the entire Old Testa- 
ment. 

28 (§ XVII.). Matthew Paris, Historia Mojora ad Annum 
1223 (Rolls Series, vol. iii. p. 78 et ff.)*; Radulph de 
Coggeshale (Chronicon Anglicanum, Rolls Series, p. 121 



NOTES. 131 

et ff. ; p. 195 et ff.) ; Roger of Hoveden's Chronicle, Prof. 
Stubbs' ed. (Rolls series, vol. ii., p. 153 et ff.). To these 
may be added William Little of Newbury (JYeubrigiensis), 
History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Year 
1197 (liber ii. chaps. 13, 15), Gervase of Canterbury, Chron- 
icon (about 1210), and at a later date Sir Henry Spelman, a 
very careful writer, born in 1561. Of these historians, all, 
or nearly all, were monks ; and, while they were very much 
alike in their prejudices against all heretics, some of them 
took more pains than others to verify their statements. Of 
these William Little of Newbury (Newbrigiensis) seems to 
have been the most careful, except, perhaps, Sir Henry 
Spelman, and Matthew Paris the least so. 

29 (§ XVII., foot-note). I have not thought it necessary to 
quote at length, beyond what I have done in the text, the 
statements of these writers in regard to the affiliation of the 
other sects, except the Waldenses, with the Bogomils of 
Bosnia ; the point is conceded by all the ecclesiastical and 
historical writers. Collier {Ecclesiastical History of Great 
Britain, vol. ii. Lathbury's ed., 1852, pp. 250, 338, 339) 
speaks of the Albigenses in Toulouse in 1161 and 1178, and 
gives an account of their doctrines from the early historians 
which shows them to be identical with those of the Publi- 
cani; on pages 341 and 414 he gives an account of their 
spreading their doctrines throughout Flanders and England 
and of their persecution; and on page 431 he gives a full 
account (from Matthew Paris) of their spreading through- 
out Western Europe and their Bulgarian pope or chief elder. 

The first great crusade against the Albigenses, Catharists, 
and other affiliated churches of Western Europe was that 
prompted by Pope Innocent III. against the heretics of 
Toulouse, the domain of Count Raymond VI. of Toulouse, 
and directed by the Roman Catholic legates Arnold, Abbot 
of Citeaux, and Milo, the infamous Count Simon de Mont- 
fort being in command of the papal troops. It lasted from 
A. D. 1209 to 1229, and hundreds of thousands of innocent 
Christian men, women, and children were massacred in cold 
blood by these inhuman butchers. De Montfort himself 
was killed in 1218, but his son was as base as the sire. 
These persecuted Christians fled in great numbers to Bosnia, 
where the " good Ban Culin " protected them against the fury 
of the pope, and in the society of their co-religionists they 
enjoyed peace and quiet. 

80 (jj XVIII.). The authorities for these particulars of the 
crusades against the Bogomils of Bosnia are Rainaldi, an 



132 NOTES. 

Italian cardinal of the sixteenth century, whose Ecclesiasti- 
cal Annals (in ten vols, fol.) are a continuation of those of 
Cardinal Baronius, and cover the period between 1197 and 
1566, and Farlati, a writer of the eighteenth century, author 
of Episcopi Bosnenses in his Illyricum Sacrum. Both 
were very bigoted and bitter Roman Catholics, and their 
hatred of the "heretics," as they called them, is manifest 
in almost every line. 

Hilferding contributes some items to this history, and 
his spirit is much more generous and just. 

31 (? XX.). This letter of Pope John XXII. may be 
found in Waddingus, Annates Minorum (vol. vii. ed. Fon- 
secse), under the year 1325. Waddingus — Luke Wadding 
— was a native of Ireland, but passed most of his life in 
Home, where he attained eminence as a scholar and author. 
He was successively procurator and vice-commissary of the 
order of St. Francis, usually called the Minorite brethren, 
and wrote their history (in eight vols, folio) under the title 
of Annales Minorum (Lyons and Rome, 1647-1654), as well 
as several other works concerning the order. The Fran- 
ciscans had had a house of their order in Bosnia since about 
1260, and their management there naturally came under 
Wadding's review. 

32 (? XXI.). This letter of Urban V. may be found in 
Rainaldi's Ecclesiastical Annals, under the year 1369, and 
the correspondence of the Franciscans with Urban V. and 
Gregory XL, as well as the substance of the letters of both 
pontiffs, in Wadding's Annales Minorum, under the years 
1369-1372. 

33 (£ XXL). For the historical facts in relation to the 
reigns of Stephen Kotromanovic, the three Tvart-kos, Ste- 
phen Thomas, and the parricide Stephen Thomasevic, the au- 
thorities on whom most reliance is to be placed are Jirecek, 
Schimek (Politike Geschichte des Konigreichs Bosnien und 
Moma), Spicilegium {De Bosnian Regno), The Book of Arms 
of the Bosnian Nobility (1340), examined and partly copied 
by Mr. Evans, and other works not accessible in this coun- 
try or England, cited by Jirecek and Evans. 

34 (g XXIL). Wadding, in his Annales Minorum, under the 
year 1462, says : " In this year . . . the pope, Pius II., being 
much alarmed at the progress of heresy in Bosnia, and 
hearing that there was a great want there of men skilled in 
philosophy, the sacred canons, and theology, sent thither 
learned men from the neighboring provinces, and especially 



NOTES. 133 

the brother Peter de Milo, a native of Bosnia, and four 
fellows. These five had studied in the best Cismontane and 
Transmontane universities, under the most learned doctors. 
The pope, moreover, gave orders that some of the largest 
convents should be converted into schools for literary- 
studies.' ■ 

This was not the first nor the last testimony unwillingly 
extorted from the papal authorities to the fact that among 
the Bogomil leaders and their co-religionists there were men 
of great learning and intellectual ability, although it was 
their constant habit to stigmatize these Protestant sects as 
ignorant rustics, too stupid and besotted to be able to under- 
stand the Scriptures or the arguments of the monks or 
bishops. The pope Honorius III., two hundred years be- 
fore, had felt compelled to send the learned and eloquent 
subdeacon Aconcius to convince and convert these Bogomils, 
and even he had failed of success. 

Hallam {Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 364) cites another in- 
stance of great interest. Pope Innocent III. (1198-1216) 
was much disturbed by the fact that the Scriptures had 
been translated into Provencal French and were largely 
circulated among the common people of the diocese of Metz 
and elsewhere. In a letter addressed to the clergy of that 
diocese, found in the Works of that pontiff (p. 468), he tells 
them that no small multitude of laymen and women, having 
procured a translation of the Gospels, Epistles of St. Paul, 
the Psalter (the Psalms), Job and other books of Scripture 
to be made for them into French, meet in secret conventicles 
to hear them read and preach to each other, avoiding the 
company of those who do not join in their devotion; and, 
having been reprimanded for this by some of their parish 
priests, have withstood them, alleging reasons from the 
Scriptures why they should not be so forbidden. After con- 
demning them for these conventicles, the pope urges the 
bishop and chapter of Metz to discover the author of this 
translation, which, he says, could not have been made with- 
out a knowledge of letters, and to ascertain what were his 
intentions, and what degree of orthodoxy and respect for 
the Holy See those who used it possessed. This letter failed 
of its desired effect ; for in another letter (p. 537 of his 
Works) he complains that some members of this little asso- 
ciation continued refractory and refused to obey either the 
bishop or the pope. That Metz was at this time full of 
Vaudois, or Waldenses, we know from other authorities, and 
it is very probable that this was the translation of the Scrip- 
tures directed by Peter Waldo, a few years before. 

12 



134 NOTES. 

35 (g XXIV.). Mr. Evans well says (ppl 56-58 of his able 
Historical Review of Bosnia) : " Perhaps enough has been 
said to show the really important part played by Bosnia in 
European history. We have seen her aid in interpreting 
to the West the sublime puritanism which the more eastern 
Sclaves of Bulgaria had first received from the Armenian 
missionaries ; we have seen her take the lead in the first re- 
ligious revolt against Rome ; we have seen a Bosnian relig- 
ious teachei directing the movement in Provence; we have 
seen the Protestants of Bosnia successfully resisting all the 
efforts of Rome, supported by the arms of Hungary, to put 
them down ; we have seen them offering an asylum to their 
persecuted brothers of the West — Albigenses, Patarenes, 
and Waldenses ; we have seen them connected with the 
Reformation in Bohemia and affording shelter to the follow- 
ers of Huss. From the twelfth century to the final conquest 
of the Turks in the sixteenth, when the fight of religious 
freedom had been won in North-western Europe, Bosnia pre- 
sents the unique phenomenon of a Protestant state existing 
within the limits of the Holy Roman Empire, and "in a 
province claimed by the Roman Church. 

" Bosnia was the religious Switzerland of mediaeval 
Europe, and the signal service which she has rendered to 
the freedom of the human intellect by her successful stand 
against authority can hardly be exaggerated. Resistance, 
broken down in the gardens of Provence, buried beneath 
the charred rafters of the Roman cities of the Langue d'Oc, 
smothered in the dungeons of the Inquisition, was pro- 
longed from generation to generation amongst the primeval 
forests and mountain-fastnesses of Bosnia. 

" There were not wanting, amongst those who sought to 
exterminate the Bogomils, churchmen as dead to human 
pity as the Abbot of Citeaux, and lay arms as bloodthirsty 
as De Montfort; but the stubborn genius of the Serbian 
people fought on with rare persistence and held out to the 
end. The history of these champions of a purer religion 
has been written by their enemies and ignored by those who 
owe most to their heroism. No martyrology of the Bogo- 
mils of Bosnia has come down to us. We have no Huss or 
Tyndale to arrest our pity. ' Invidious silence ' has ob- 
scured their fame. 

' Illachryraabilis 
Urgentur, ignotique longa 
Noete, careut quia vate sacro.' 

" Protestant historians, fearful of claiming relationship 



NOTES. 135 

with heretics whose views on the origin of evil were more 
logical than their own, have almost or entirely ignored the 
existence of the Sclavonic Puritans. " This sharp rebuke is 
especially deserved by Dean Milman in his Latin Christi- 
anity, and by Archbishop Trench in his recent Lectures on 
Ecclesiastical History. Others are not wholly guiltless. 
" Yet of all worn-out devices of ad captandum argument, 
this assuredly is the most threadbare — to ignore the transi- 
tions of intervening links, and, pointing to the extremes of 
a long concatenation of causes and effects, to seize upon 
their differences as a proof of disconnection. In the course 
of ages the development of creeds and churches is not less 
striking than that of more secular institutions. Bogomil- 
ism obeyed an universal law; it paid the universal tribute 
of successful propagandism : it compromised, or, where it 
did not compromise, it was ruthlessly stamped out. The 
Manichaean elements, most distasteful to modern Protest- 
ants, were in fact the first to disappear." (" Yes, if indeed 
they ever really existed among the Bogomils." — Author 
of The Bogomils of Bulgaria and Bosnia.) " In its contact 
with the semi-pagan Christianity of the West the puritanism 
of the Gnostic East became, perforce, materialized ; just as, 
ages before, Christianity itself, an earlier wave of the same 
Eastern puritanism, had materialized in its contact with the 
undiluted heathendom of the Western empire. To a cer- 
tain extent, Bogomilism gained. It lost something of its 
anti-human vigor, and, by conforming to the exigences of 
Western society, became to a certain extent more practical. 
Thus, by the sixteenth century the path had been cleared 
for a compromise with orthodoxy itself. The Reformation 
marks the confluence of the two main currents of religious 
thought that traverse the Middle Ages in their several 
sources, Romish and Armenian. No doubt, from the ortho- 
dox side — which refused to reject all that was beautiful 
in the older world, which consecrated Grseco-Roman civil- 
ization and linked art with religion — the West has gained 
much ; but in days of gross materialism and degrading 
sacerdotalism it has gained perhaps even more from the 
purging and elevating influence of these early Puritans. 
The most devout Protestant need not be afraid to acknow- 
ledge the religious obligations which he owes to his spiritual 
forefathers, Manichsean though they were ; while those who 
perceive in Protestantism itself nothing more than a step- 
ping-stone to still greater freedom of the human mind, and 
who recognize the universal bearings of the doctrine of 
Evolution, will be slow to deny that England herself and 



136 



NOTES. 



the most enlightened countries of the modern world may 
owe a debt, which it is hard to estimate, to the Bogomils 
of Bulgaria and Bosnia." 

It is to be remembered that these are the thoughtful and 
well-considered words of a traveller and scholar who has 
no affiliation with Puritan or Baptist, who, while professedly 
a member of the Anglican Church, has strong leanings 
toward evolution, but who, from his English love of fair 
play, and the conviction derived from extended and careful 
research, and the pure and stainless lives of these Protest- 
ants of the East, has been compelled to take up arms in 
their defence. 

We have shown elsewhere and from other sources that 
the movement of the Bogomils and their co-religionists of 
Western Europe was independent of, and had very little 
connection with, the .Reformation. Never having belonged 
to Borne, they had no occasion to reform her doctrines or 
churches, and in fact had as little to do with the Refor- 
mation as the Protestant and independent churches of to-day 
have with the Old Catholic movement. They may have 
wished the Beformation well, as we do this Old Catholic 
movement ; but as we have not, and cannot have, any affili- 
ation with it, while it holds so many Bomish errors, so they 
were precluded from any direct affiliation with the Re- 
formed churches, for the same reason. 



IlsTDEX. 



Affiliated churches made some 
departures from earlier faith, 
117. 

Alanus de Insults, a French writer 
about a. d. 1200, testifies to 
the practice of baptism by the 
Albigenses, 119, 121, 122. 

Albigenses and Catharists, cru- 
sade against, 1209-1229, 131. 

Alexiad, a history of the reign of 
Alexius Cotnnenus I. by the 
princess Anna Comnena, 46, 
123, 127. 

Alexius Comnenus f ., emperor, a 
cruel and base persecutor, 46- 
52. 

Alleged heresies of the Armenian 
or Eastern churches, 16, 17. 

Ancient Christian books and ves- 
sels in the vaults of Bosnian 

' castles, 99. 

Anna Comnena, daughter of 
Alexius, her persecuting 
spirit, 46-52, 116. 
on the martyrdom of Basil 
in the Alexiad, 47-51. 

Architectural display, pictures, 
images, etc., prohibited by 
Eastern churches, 19, 20. 

Aryan religious system modified 
by Christianity, 16, 17. 

Authorities in regard to practice 
of immersion by the Oriental 
churches, 123. 

Baal, non-worshippers of, in 

Elijah's time, 8. 
Baptism practised in the Eastern 

churches, 19. 
Baptist churches go back of 

the Keformation, and to the 

apostles and to their churches 

for their origin, 118. 

12* 



Baptist churches, what are the 
distinguishing characteris- 
tics of, 108-110. 
popular view on this subject 

erroneous, 108. 
a careful analysis of their 
views, negative and posi- 
tive, 108-110. 
Bartholomew, the alleged Bogo- 

milian vicar in Toulouse, 70. 
Basil, a Bulgarian djed, or elder, 
of the Bogomils in a. d. 1081, 
entrapped and burned at the 
stake by Alexius Comnenus; 
his noble confession of his 
faith, and martyrdom, 47-51. 
Beausobre, Histoire du Manichce- 

ism, quoted, 121, 127. 
Bela II., King of Hungary, and 
suzerain of Bosnia, makes a 
raid against the Patarenes, or 
Bogomils, of the Herzegovina, 
but without effect, 62, 63. 
Bela IV., King of Hungary, aids 
the archbishop of Colocz in 
1246 in a third crusade, 76. 
Bogomil and affiliated churches 
not much helped or enlarged 
by the Beformation. Why? 
117, 118. 
Bogomil churches had purged 
themselves of earlier er- 
rors, 116. 
Baptist churches, 12. 
in Bosnia and the Herzego- 
vina, or the principality 
of Chel in, or duchy of St. 
Sava, 60. 
their constant tendency to- 
ward a purer orthodoxy, 
130. 
mostly founded from the he- 
ginning of the tenth to the 

137 



138 



INDEX. 



close of the eleventh cen- 
tury, 61. 
Bogomil churches at the latter 
date embrace a large por- 
tion of the population, 61. 
enjov a period of quiet and 
peace from 1256 to 1320, 78. 
Bogomil congregation and its 
services described, 32-36. 
chanting psalms, etc., 35. 
Bogomil doctrines and practices, 
described, and authority 
given, 37-42. 
their alleged rejection of the 
Old Testament, 126. 
Bogomil New Testament word for 

word that of Methodius, 126. 
Bogomil elder or cljed, atypical, 
described, 33, 34. 
his preaching, 34-36. 
possessed no judicial or ec- 
clesiastical authority, 127. 
Bogomilian literature, scarcity 
of, reasons for, 103. 
will probablv soon be brought 
to light, 1*14. 
Bogomils, a name first applied to 
Paulicians in the tenth 
century, 29. 
the plainness of their 
churches not so serious an 
objection to their worship 
as might be supposed, 31, 32. 
nearly a million martyred 
between the eighth and 
fifteenth centuries in Bul- 
garia and Bosnia, 114. 
no hierarchy tolerated among 

them, 70, 71. 
their identity with thePubli- 
cani, Waldenses, and other 
sects in the West proved by 
the testimony of monkish 
writers, 71, 72. 
afford refuge from persecu- 
tion to the affiliated sects 
in the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries, 71. 
not terrified by the persecu- 
tion of the archbishop of 
Colocz in 1222-1233, but 
increased in numbers and 
activity, 74. 
never persecutors when in 
power. 77, 78. 
Bogomils of Bosnia turn to the 



Turks for protection from 
Stephen Thomas's persecu- 
tion in 1450, 87. 

make a treaty with Sultan 
Mohammed II. in 1463, on 
account of the malignity 
of Stephen Tomasevic, 89. 

their surrender of fortresses 
to the sultan, 89, 90. 

the infamous treachery of 
Mohammed II. to, 1463, 
90, 91. 

the adults did not emhrace 
Mohammedanism, 92. 

the young men placed with 
the Janissaries became 
Mohammedans, and their 
descendants are Sclavonian 
Mohammedans now, 91. 

did not entirely die out, some 
existing in sixteenth, 
seventeenth, eighteenth, 
and nineteenth centuries, 
92, 93. 
Bogomils of Bulgaria and Bosnia, 
10. 

protected by the Czar Du- 
shan, Stephen Kotromano- 
vie, and the three Tvart- 
kos (1325-1443), 79-86. 
Bosnia, Bogomil churches of, or- 
thodox in doctrine and ac- 
tive in missionarv labors, 
from 1100 to 1220, as well as 
later, 66, 67, 112. 

leavened with Paulician doc- 
trines, 29. 

vast increase in their adhe- 
rents all over Western Eu- 
rope, 67, 68. 

Culin, ban of, in 1175-1205, 
63-65. 

Zibisclav, ban of, 1205-1241, 
72-76. 

Stephen Kotromanovic, ban 
of, 1325-1358, 79-83. 

Stephen Tvart-ko, ban and 
king of, 1358-1391, 83, 84. 

protects the Bogomils, 84. 

Tvartko II., ban and king of, 
1391-1396. 84, 85. 

Tvartko III., " the Just," ban 
and king of, 1396-1443, 85, 
86. 

Stephen Thomas, ban and 
king of, 1443-1459, 86-88. 



INDEX. 



139 



Bosnia, Stephen Tomasevic, ban 
and king of, "Usurper," 
1459-1463, 88-90. 
his cowardliness, 88, 89. 
government, and political 
condition of, at this period, 
61. 
passes under the over-lord- 
ship of the kings of Serbia 
1275, 78. 
Serbia, and Croatia inde- 
pendent states, 28. 
Serbia and Croatia, inhabi- 
tants of, Sclavonians, 28. 
Bohemia, missionary labors of 

Bogomils in, 130. 
Book of Arms of the Bosnian Nobil- 
ity, The (1340), partly copied by 
Evans, 132. 
Bulgaria becomes an empire, 28. 
Bulgarian Bogomils more dual- 
istic than those of Bosnia; 
reasons for this, 52, 53. 
the purity of their lives ; 
their acceptance of Christ 
as their Redeemer, their 
prayerfulness, etc., 54, 55. 
their" repudiation of the 
Greek and Roman Catholic 
dogmas, 55, 56. 
the asceticism of their elders 

and Perfecti, 56, 57. 
absence of any hierarchy 

among them, 59, 60. 
activity in missionary labors, 
58, 59. 
Bulgarian czars threaten Con- 
stantinople, 28. 
Czar Samuel a Bogomil, 

30. 
Empire, its fall after one 
hundred and fifty years, 
45. 

Collier, Jeremy, Ecclesiastical 
History of Great Britain, 121, 
122, 131. 
Colocz, an archbishop of, 1222, 
leads the first crusade 
against the Bogomils for 
eleven years, 73, 74. 
another archbishop of, leads 
a third crusade in 1246, 
76. 
persuades the pope to trans- 
fer the see of Bosnia to the 



archiepiscopal diocese of 
Colocz, 76. 
Coloman, Ban of Sclavonia and 
brother of the king of Hun- 
gary, undertakes a second 
crusade against the Bogo- 
mils in 1238, 75. 

is congratulated on his suc- 
cess by Pope Gregory IX. 
in 1240, 75. 

is slain in battle with the Tar- 
tar khan Ugadai, 1241, 76. 
Consolamentum, the. or baptism 

of the Holy Spirit, 19. 
Constantine V. (Copronymos) an 
iconoclast, 23. 

in his later years a Paulician, 
24. 
Cosaccia, Stephen, Duke of St. 
Sava, at first a Roman 
Catholic, becomes a Bogo- 
mil, and protects them, 86. 

averts the Turkish assaults 
from 1463 to 1483, 91. 
Cosmos, the presbyter, testimony 
in regard to the purity of 
the Bogomil teaching, 80, 
119, 120, 123, 127. 

his work, Slovo na Eretiki, 
against them, 120, 127. 
Oredentes, or believers ; these con- 
stituted the great body of 
members of the Bogomil 
churches, 39. 

initiatory rules for their re- 
ception, 39, 40. 

reasons for believing that 
they were baptized — i. e., 
immersed — when received, 
39-41, note. 

high social position of. in 
Bosnia and Bulgaria, 42. 
Culin, the good ban, ruler of Bos- 
nia, a Bogomil, 63, 64. 

recants in favor of Rome in 
1181, but relapses soon af- 
ter, and protects the Bogo- 
mils, 65. 

Daniel, Roman Catholic Bishop 

of Bosnia, joins the Bogomils, 

65. 
Decline of the dualistic doctrine, 

22. 
Denial of Baptist editors that 

there was any evidence at pres- 



140 



INDEX. 



ent attainable of the existence 

of Baptist churches between 

the fourth and eleventh or 

twelfth centuries, 107. 
Doctrines of the Bogomils purer 

than those of the Reformers, 

101. 
Dregovisce, or Dregovice, church 

of, more dualistic than the 

Christian church of Bulgaria, 

18, 120, 125. 
Dualistic doctrines prevalent in 

the early Eastern churches, 18. 

Dante Alighieri, a Patarene or 

Bogomil in early life, 99. 

influence of their doctrines 

seen in his works, 99. 

De Montfort, Count Simon, an 

infamous persecutor, died 1218, 

131. 

Early" Baptist church histori- 
ans, views of, 7. 
Epiphanius, a Byzantine writer 
on Bogomils, quoted in An- 
dres's Disquisitio de Bogomilis, 
120. 
Euthymius, Zygabenus, scribe* 
of Alexius Com n en us, re- 
viles the Bogomils for the 
purity of their life and 
teachings, 80, 81. 
Panoplia written by him, 
1097, 120, 123. 
Evans, Mr. A. J., Historical Re- 
view of Bosnia, 10, 119, 120, 
125, 127, 132, 134, 136. 
his extensive researches, 10. 
his exhaustive study, 69. 
his Lllyrian Letters, 98. 
his summing up of what the 
Bogomils accomplished, 
134-136. 

Farlati, " Episcopi Bosnenses " 
in his lllyricum Sacrum, 121. 
cited by Evans, 152. 

Gardiner and Blunt, ecclesiasti- 
cal cyclopsedists, on Bogomils 
since sixteenth century, 92. 

Gervase of Canterbury, notices 
of Publicani, 72, 122, 131. 

Gibbon, account of Paulicians in 
Decline and Fall referred to, 69, 
120, 123, 124, 127. 



Gieseler, De Bogomilis Commen- 
tatio, quoted, 121. 

Hallam, testimony concerning 
these sects in his State of Eu- 
rope during the Middle Ages, 
and his Literature of Europe, 69, 
122, 124, 126, 128, 12*9, 130, 133. 
Harmenopoulos, a Byzantine 
monk, testimony of, concern- 
ing baptism among Bogomils, 
40, 119, 121. 
Hilferding's Serbenund Bulgaren, 
testimony concerning the Bog- 
omils, 69,' 119, 120, 121, 125, 127. 
Hungary, king of, in 1205 causes 
the election of Zibisclav, a 
Sclavonian Catholic, Ban 
of Bosnia, 72, 73. 
kings of, overlords of Bosnia, 

about 1320, 79. 
Louis, king of, overlord of 
Bosnia, 1355-1389, 83, 84. 
Huss, John, the Bohemian Re- 
former, a Bogomil, 85. 

Irene, Empress (780-802), a bit- 
ter persecutor of Paulicians, 24. 

Jirecek's, Geschichte der Bulga- 
ren,, 10. 
his testimony to the affilia- 
tion of the Bogomils with 
the early Protestants of 
Western Europe, 69, 119, 
121, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132. 

La Nobla Leyczon, a Provencal 
poem of the latter part of the 
twelfth century, 123, 124, 129. 
Leo IV. (775-780) a persecutor of 

the Paulicians, 24. 
Little, William, of Newbury (Neu- 
brigiensis), 1136-1220, quoted, 
121, 127, 128, 131. 
Lyons, manuscript discovered in, 
1850, 103, 104. 
published by Cunitz in Jena 

in, 1852, 104. 
written in the Romance, Pro- 
vencal, and Latin, 103, 104. 
its formularies of confession, 
of reception of the Credenti 
and the Perfecti, 104-106. 
the Perfecti called bons hom- 
ines in, 105, 106. 



INDEX. 



141 



Lyons manuscript of but little 
importance, 106. 
its forms a wide departure 
from those of the early 
Bogomils, 106, 107. 

Maitland, Facts and Documents 
on the History of the Albigenses 
and Waldenses, 1832, 127. 
Manichaeans, a name of reproach 
persistently applied to Bogo- 
mils aud Paulicians, 29. 
Matthew Paris, incidental no- 
tices of Publicani, 69, 130, 131. 
Milman, Dean, ignores the exist- 
ence of Sclavonic Puritans in 
his Latin Christianity, 135. 
Milton, John, traces of the Bogo- 
mil doctrines in his Paradise 
Lost, 100. 
Mohammed II., Sultan of Turkey, 
a base and. infamous prince, 
90. 
his horrible cruelty to the 
Bogomils, 90, 91. 
Molokani, the, Mr. Wallace's ac- 
count of them, 93-97. 
their views correspond com- 
pletely with those of the 
Bogomils, 94-97. 

Neander, Church History, quot- 
ed, 121, 123. 

Oriental wars in all ages re- 
ligious wars, 13, 14. 

Orthodoxy of the Greek and Ko- 
man churches doctrinal and 
speculative; that of the Bogo- 
mils practical and consisting in 
holy and pure living, 43, 44. 

Paulicians and Bogomils, the, 
did they hold to Baptist 
doctrines? 111. 
grossly misrepresented by 

their enemies, 111. 
the old Manichsean charge 

against them, 111. 
far less heretical than the 
Greek and Boman church- 
es, 113. 
Paulician movement becomes 

Sclavonic, 28. 
Paulicians resist Theodora and 
threaten Constantinople, 26. 



Paulicians, called Manichaeans, 
Bogomils, Massalians, and 
Euchites, 29. 
only acknowledged the name 

of Christians, 29. 
transplanted to Thrace by 

Constantine V., 23, 24, 26. 
under Carneas, resist the 
barbarities of Theodora, 
124, 125. 
possible cause of their dual- 

istic doctrines, 125. 
reputed dualistic views of, in 
fifth and sixth centuries, 
20, 21, 22, 23. 
holv and exemplary lives of 
123. 
Perfecti, female members of, en- 
gaged in teaching the ignorant, 
caring for sick and poor, and 
other work of deaconesses, 41, 
42. 
Perfecti or " perfect ones " among 
the Bogomils, 37-39. 
their consecration, restric- 
tions, and duties, 121, 130. 
their number, 38. 
women members of the, 41, 
42. 
Persecution of Paulicians very 
bitter, 775-802, 24. 
relaxed from 802 to 837, 21. 
renewed cruelly by Theo- 
dora, 837-852, 25. 
Peter de Milo, a learned Catholic 
professor, sent by Pope Pius 
II. to convince the Bogomils in 
1462, 132, 133. 
Petrus Monachus, a Cistercian 
monk, author of a history of 
the crusade against the Albi- 
genses, 121, 126. 
Petrus Siculus, 830-880, or there- 
abouts, legate of the Byzan- 
tine emperor to Tephrie§ 
in 870, Historia Manichoeo- 
rum, 120, 123, 126. 
edition of his historv by the 
Jesuit Raderus, 1604, 120. 
Planta, History of Switzerland, 
note in, from a chronicle in 
the twelfth century, found in 
the abbey of Corvey, 129. 
Pobratimtsvo, the, what it was, 
87, note. 
Stephen Thomas joins him- 



142 



INDEX. 



self to the sultan in it in 
1457, 87. 
Points in common between the 
Greek and the Roman 
churches, 15. 
Pope Gregory IX. accepts Zibis- 
clav's abjuration, 74. 
is enraged at tbe boldness of 

the Bogomils, 74. 
sends Colomau to Bosnia to 
exterminate the heretics 
in 1238, 75. 
congratulates Coloman on 
his success in " wiping out 
the heresy" in 1240, 75. 
Pope Honorius III. endeavors to 
convert the Bogomils by 
argument, 73. 
sends the subdeacon Acon- 
cius to Bosnia for this 
purpose, 73, 133. 
Pope Innocent III. furious 
against Bogomils, 65, 66. 
pacified by election of Zibis- 

clav, 72. 
forbids the use of the trans- 
lation of the Scriptures in 
Provencal in Metz, 133. 
Pope Innocent TV. begins a third 
crusade against the Bogo- 
mils in 1246, 76. 
transfers the see of Bosnia 
to the archdiocese of 
Colocz, 76. 
Popes Alexander IV., Urban IV., 
and Clement IV. attempt to 
convert the Bogomils by per- 
suasion instead of force, 77. 
Pope John XXII. a fierce per- 
secutor of the Bogomils, 79. 
letter of, in 1325, to Stephen 
Kotromanovic, ban of Bos- 
nia, 79, 80. 
Pope Benedict XII. attempts to 
start a fourth crusade in 1337, 
but fails, 82. 
Pope Urban V. writes to Louis, 
Kins of Hungary, complaining 
of his nephew, King Stephen 
Tvart-ko, for protecting Bogo- 
mils, 84. 
Pope Calixtus III. appealed to by 
Stephen Thomas in 1457 for aid 
in persecuting the Bogomils, 
87. 
Pope Pius II. appealed to by 



Stephen Tomasevic in 1459 and 
1463 for aid against the Bogo- 
mils aud Turks, 88, 132. 
Pope, the alleged Bogomilian, in 

Bosnia, 70. 
Prague, Jerome of, the Hunga- 
rian Reformer, a Bogomil, 85. 
Proofs here offered of the exist- 
ence of Baptist churches be- 
tween the fourth and twelfth 
centuries, 107, 108. 
Protestants should be proud of 

their spiritual lineage, 102. 

Publicani, descendants of, in 

England in the fifteenth 

and sixteenth century, 101. 

known as "Hot Gospellers," 

101, note. 
English and Flemish Bogo- 
mils, 68. 
persecuted by Henry II., 

68. 
martyrdom of a young girl 
belongi ug to the, at Bheims, 
72. 
Publicani, or Poplicani, a cor- 
ruption of Pauliciani, 70. 
Puritan writers influenced by 
Bogomil teachings, 100. 

Rainaldi, an Italian cardinal of 
sixteenth century ; his Ecclesi- 
astical Annals, 1197-1566, ten 
vols., chronicle the persecution 
of the Bogomils, 131, 132. 

Ralph of CoM'geshale, notices of 
Publicani," 69, 70, 71. 72, 131. 

References to early Protestants 
by ecclesiastical writers of the 
Dark Ages, 11. 

Reformation, the, in some sense 
a retrogression for the Bogo- 
mils, 100, 101. 

Reinero Sacconi, or Regnier, a 
renegade Bogomil or Patarene 
and inquisitor, testimony of, 
concerning the Bogomils and 
Patarenes, 38, 120, 121, 127. 

Repudiation of Mariolatry and 
worship of saints and images 
by these churches, 18. 

Roger of Hoveden, notices of Al- 
bigenses and Publicani, 69, 70, 
122, 131. 

Schimek, Polittke Geschichte des 



INDEX. 



143 



Konigsreichs Bosnian und Roma, 
cited by Evans, 127, 132. 
Sclavonic Mohammedan noble 
(Bey), views of a, on return to 
Protestantism, in 1878, 98, 99. 
Serbia, by Misses Mackenzie and 

Irwin, quoted, 127. 
Serbia, Stephen Dushan, Czar of, 
overlord of Bosnia, 1340- 
1355, 82. 
Stephen Drasfutin, King of, 
overlord of Bosnia. 1275, 78. 
Milutin Urosh II., King of, 
overlord of Bosnia, 1291, 
permits Franciscan monks 
to establish the Inquisition 
in Bosnia in 1291, 78. 
"Sisters of Charity," etc., antici- 
pated, long before, by Bogomil 
women, 112. 
Spelman, Sir Henry, Concilia; 
(1561-1641), quoted, 121, 128, 
131. 
Spicilegium, author of De Bosnia; 

Regno, cited bv Evans, 132. 
Stillman, W. J.", United States 
consul at Ragusa, on Bogomils, 
in 1875, 93. 
Stundisti, Mr. Wallace's refer- 
ence to them, 93, 97. 
Synodic of the Czar Boris, cited by 
Hilferding, written in 1210, 
120. 

Tephrice, free state and city of, 
sends out missionaries, 26, 
120. 
free state and city of, decline 

and extinction of, 26. 
the first state to maintain 
freedom of conscience, 27, 
115. 
Theodora, empress regent, (837- 
852), puts to death one hundred 
thousand or more Paulicians, 
25. 



Thomasini, the papal legate 
threatens Stephen Thomas, 
and compels him to abjure the 
Bogomil faith, 86. 

Trench, Archbishop R. C, does 
great injustice to the Bogomils 
and their associates in his Lec- 
tures on Ecclesiastical History, 
135. 

Waddingus, Luke Wadding, 
procurator of the Franciscan 
monks, author of Annates Min- 
or um, 130, 133. 
Waldo, Peter, was he the founder 
of the Waldenses? 128-130. 
his translation of the Scrip- 
tures, 130. 
his position that of a magis- 
ter, djed, or elder, 130. 
Wallace, t). Mackenzie, on the 
Molokani and Stundisti in Rus- 
sia, 93-97. 
Wars between different divisions 
of the Christian Church, 14, 
15. 
Water baptism practised by 
Eastern churches ; source of 
error on this subject, 19. 

Zibisclav, a Sclavonian Catholic, 
elected Ban of Bosnia. 72, 73. 
his conversion to the Bogo- 
mil faith, 73. 
is compelled to abjure his 
errors to Pope Gregory 
IX., 74. 
proves a traitor to his nation, 

75. 
killed in battle with the 
Tartar kahn Ugadai, 1241, 
76. 
Zonaras, a Byzantine writer, 
cited by Gibbon concerning 
the Paulicians who colonized 
Thrace, 970, 124. 



THE END. 



